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“A-ha!” Pidge said. She sat up straighter. She had just connected the final wire to the captured Sentry’s back. It sat up straight, and the slit in its helmet flashed purple, as though it was looking at her.
Great. They would be able to talk to it now.
They’d captured it from a Galra base yesterday, and it was Pidge’s job to find out information. Usually that was done by just hacking into the contents of the brain and displaying it on her laptop, but, to be perfectly honest, she’d just wanted a bit of a challenge. Besides, she missed Rover. It would be fun to reprogram a sentry.
Sentries were simple beings, of course, not even full AI. It wouldn’t be able to tell them things like the purpose of the base or the best way in, but it might be able to talk about the floor plan, or the chain of command—anything that could easily be expressed as data.
“Hey,” Pidge said. “Tell me a joke.”
The Sentry flopped its head. “Knock knock.”
What? She’d been expecting something like I do not know what you are talking about.
“Who… who’s there?” she asked tentatively.
“Sentry.”
“Sentry who?”
“Sentry 11745.”
Pidge sighed. “That’s not funny. This is going to take some work.” After a minute she added, “I bet Lance will have some ideas.”
She stood up, her legs immediately itching. She’d been sitting in the same spot for over an hour. After rubbing out the prickles, she went to find Lance.
“Hey Lance,” she called into the lounge. He wasn’t there.
She went to the kitchen. “Hey Lance.” Hunk turned around. “Just me, sorry.”
She went to the hangar. “Lance.” Green greeted her with a few snippets of binary. Blue twitched, giving her a glance, but Lance wasn’t there.
Where is that boy? There were still a few more places to check. She went to his room and stopped outside the door.
Ah yes, this is it. She could hear him inside, mumbling about something.
She knocked. “Hey Lance.”
There was no reply.
“Hey Lance. Hey. Hey Lance. Hey. Hey.”
She paused for a moment of mild consternation. Was he ignoring her on purpose? She’d have thought maybe he was sleeping, or something, but it sounded like he was talking to somebody. She’d passed everybody during her trek through the castle though. Who could be in there?
“I’m coming in now,” she yelled loudly. “Everybody better be decent.” And then she pressed the button for the door.
It slid open and she saw him, on his knees, with his hands on the bed, and with something out in front of him. A split-second later, whatever he had was gone, and he was scrambling to his feet.
“Pidge! Oh—Oh hi Pidge—” he was clearly thrown off his game, but he seemed to recover it quickly. “You could knock, geez, ever heard of knocking?”
“I did knock, you didn’t hear? Who were you talking to?” Pidge looked around Lance’s room as if to find the person who he was hiding in there.
“Oh, that was uh…” he scratched the back of his neck, elbow in the air. “Never mind.”
She flashed a shine of her glasses at him (defying the laws of physics, she could do that on purpose, and often did. It was her only way of intimidating people). “All right then,” she said. “I guess I’d be a hypocrite to pry. We all have our secrets, right?”
Lance shrugged awkwardly.
“I just wanted to show you the progress I made with the sentry.” It seemed kind of silly now, like not such a big deal.
“Sure, I’ll come.” Lance followed her into the hall.
While they were walking along, still just the two of them, he burst out, “Listen, it’s not like it’s really a secret. I just—I just uh…”
“Look, dude. It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I don’t care.”
“I… I uh…” he trailed off.
“Wait, no.” Pidge rubbed her nose with her sleeve and shook her head. “I don’t mean I don’t care, like that, I just mean that it’s fine or whatever.” Why not just keep blathering and make things weird? She shut herself up right then.
“I’m Christian,” said Lance.
Pidge nodded. She didn’t turn around until she realized he’d stopped walking. He had slowed and was standing in the corridor.
She nodded. Then suddenly it clicked, the kneeling, he was praying. “Ohhhhhh…” (Was this how the Lance felt when he found out she was a girl?... No, he was way more shocked than this.)
“I’ve been afraid to tell you,” he mumbled, looking at the floor. “I thought… a person as smart as you would think it was just a bunch of… silly superstition or something. I shouldn’t have been afraid but I didn’t want you to think worse about me.”
The idea that Lance would be afraid of her opinion on anything was, actually, shocking.
“Lance you don’t need to worry about that! I would never make fun of you. I mean okay I would, but not about that. Besides, I’m actually a theist.”
“Well, figures, I figured you were an atheist—”
“A. Space. Theist.”
“An atheist but like in space?”
She couldn’t suppress a dry laugh. “No! A theist. A person who thinks there’s a God, Lance.”
“You do?” He perked up, looking her questioningly in the eye.
“Sure I do.” She smiled, and kept walking backwards toward the bay where she’d been working on the sentry. Lance, persuaded, followed her again. “How could I not? The universe is just so mathematically elegant. I don’t believe any of this could be chance. The likelihood of life appearing by chance, not only once, but many thousands of times? It’s unbelievably improbable. I mean, think about it. For every new species we discover, the likelihood of intelligent design is increased by orders of magnitude.”
Lance smiled a little bit. “My mamá used to say something like that. Well, not in those words, exactly. But…” he squinted. “You’re always talking about, like, the enlightenment of science. I thought you’d agree with the scientists.”
“Which ones? Scientists are people, they think different things, you know. There’s no one single belief system for smart people. A lot of the really great scientists were religious. Heck, Sir Isaac Newton, who figured out modern physics, Francis Bacon, Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, Louis Pasteur, Johannes Keppler, a pioneer of modern astronomy— He was the first person to separate astronomy from astrology using the scientific method.”
“They didn’t talk about that in history class.”
“They mostly don’t.” She could feel herself getting over-excited, but was unable to stop herself. “Take the Fibonacci sequence. The sequence of numbers that goes, one, one, two, three, five, eight… and so on? We’ve found that same sequence in nautilus shells and pinecones and flowers. The golden ratio is involved in everything from the field of vision to phyllotaxis—”
Lance scratched his head. “Phylo- what?”
“It’s everywhere, even out here in space. I found it in spiral galaxies and black holes and Ballmeran crystals. It was even there in the plants on Alkarion. Remember that? When I was telepathically connected to their planet’s biome through Green? You wouldn’t believe the things I saw. You wouldn’t believe the things I knew. People can’t really grasp the complexity of the chemical components of life, but just for a few minutes, I had it. All the information in all the DNA and the proteins and the cellular structure and the math funneling into me like some kind of overworked processor hitting its limit. I thought my brain was breaking at the seams. It was too much to understand. I don’t know how much more of that I could have taken; it’s a good thing I disconnected when I did.”
He blinked. “Wow. I had that funny tiara on but I didn’t notice any of that.”
“You didn’t have Green.”
“I figured I was just…”
Dumb. He didn’t say it, but she heard it. “No, Lance! You think I went into Alkarion knowing anything about molecular bioengineering? I know a few things, I mean my mom does study plants for a living, but I had a big hand. Green converts binary and lower-level codes into higher languages for me all the time. I wouldn’t have been able to encode DNA without her help.”
“Oh.”
Pidge had enough experience to know when oh meant you’re sort of losing me.
“Anyway,” she said, “The point is, I’m still amazed by the Alkari. They don’t have Green and they’re still able to do all of that stuff. They’re way beyond me.”
But Lance, lost though he might have been was looking far less nervous. “When I said my mamá said something like that, I mean she used to tell us—my siblings and I— that God created the world, and how amazing it is just proves how amazing he is. I think she thought—I think she thought the same as you, Pidge, just with less math. She is smart, though.”
“I’m sure she is,” said Pidge. “You don’t have to think in math to be smart.”
They had strayed far beyond their original topic, and now reached the door of the room where Pidge had been working on the Sentry.
“Here it is,” she said, pushing the button. The door slid open.
“What were you gonna show me?” asked Lance.
“Oh, yeah, about that. I thought you could help me come up with some jokes to put in it. You know, to surprise the rest of the team.”
Lance smiled slyly and jogged over to the Sentry, then folded his long limbs under him, inspecting it. “Hmmm.”
“What’s this about jokes?”
Pidge turned around. Coran had popped his mustache in around the doorframe. “I’ve got a good joke.”
“Sure.” Pidge pulled up her laptop, ready to start typing.
“Why did the Yelmore cross the Quasar?”
“Uh… why?”
“To get to the other Molbax!”
There was an uncomfortable pause as she and Lance looked at each other.
“That’s super funny, Coran,” said Lance. “You’re a riot.”
“I know,” said Coran, and walked away, looking pleased with himself.