Vicki sat at the bar, knocking back another blood-mary, ironically mostly literal blood. Gizzy sipped hers, also lacking normal ingredients.

  “So what’s really going on here?” Vicki asked.

  “Just, havin a drink.” Gizzy replied.

  “We both know this is just an excuse for your ulterior motives. The nightmares, the mind control experiment you’re probably running?”

  “What?!” Gizzy scoffed suspiciously. “I would absolutely never run a mind control experiment on anyone without consent and safety protocols…except like a sworn enemy or something. I don’t have ulterior motives, the mission briefing was legit, and I may not be the exactly same as you remember 200 years ago, but 99.973 percent identical. I have the scans.”

  “Honestly, I haven’t been the same either lately. I can’t even tell my new therapist why I’m so fucked up. I thought I’d be better with a therapist that wasn’t just you in disguise, but then I end up hiding things I would have told you. I’m technically illegally killing people for you, and I’m hallucinating a mission that didn't happen.”

  “Illegal is kinda gray, since I own half the cops and politicians on Delmar, but I get the point. You’re not actually hallucinating; you're remembering a mission that got wiped. Neither of us came home from that mission. Even I don’t remember the end of it, which is a bad sign itself. I transferred most of my consciousness and edited memories to Delmar. The weird thing is…you shouldn’t remember anything at all because you never went, your clone did, and she never came back. It was a one way mission, neither of us did. I didn’t send back your memory. Just mine and Dee’s. Everyone else, including you, should have no memory of it, because nobody on that mission survived. I’m actually trying to understand why you can remember any of it.” Gizzy sighed.

  “We had something awkward, didn’t we? I remember us fighting, me turning evil, and then I remember being back on the crew and things weren’t the same with me and Jack. And for some reason now when I hear Frank Sinatra, I think of you. I get this weird feeling like I’m annoyed that you’re playing that same damn song again, but nobody else is around. What happened?”

  “Fly me to the moon. Shit if I know why we both know that. That’s part I intentionally didn’t send. I always mark my memories with an encoded watermark, so I know it wasn’t just a drug trip or dream. No watermark. I remember us fighting, you rejoining the crew, and that awkward tension you mentioned, and then suddenly there’s a huge blank. I remember walking past you in the hall of a different ship, exchanging a look like both had something to say but couldn’t say it in front of the crew. You looked kinda pissed off. And when I hear Frank Sinatra, I get a really ominous feeling like we both know what it was about, but nobody else did. Then I start craving calamari. That’s probably unrelated.” She shrugged. “Bartender…more bloody marry.”

  “That is just 100 proof vodka and Tapatio.” Said the friendly salt-and-pepper bearded hologram.

  “I know, that’s how I make a Bloody Mary. I want more.”

  “I think it’s pretty obvious what happened.” Vicki said, turning and crossing her legs with a strange borderline accusation as if trying to interrogate the information out. She looked as if she didn’t believe the memory wipe at all, and her deep stare pried for a confession Gizzy didn’t have.

  “I think you’re on a very different page than me if you think so. I think everyone died, and we were the last to go. Stuck together.” Gizzy said, kicking back a swig.

  “I…was gonna say we had an affair, but Jesus H fuck, you think everyone died first and then us later? No wonder we wiped that. I thought we wiped out us cheating, I thought you knew about it and set up this whole mission because we’re both finally single, and you know guns and murder turns me on too. My marriage just ended because of that. You actually don’t remember it?” she asked, looking alarmed.

  “NO.” Gizzy assured. “Which would make no sense if it was just a fling we had. You don’t memory wipe over a fling. You get drunk and move on. I’ve had flings, and I’ve been married 34 times over 150 centuries. I’d be annoying you with the reminder that we had a thing if that were something I remembered, and you didn’t. That’s the kinda shit I find hilarious…unless we had a fling specifically because everyone else was dead and the options were really narrowed down. Which would explain the memory wipe. Huh, I guess everyone died but us, and we stuck around alone for a while.” Gizzy pondered. "Apparently a long while."

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  “It’s the only explanation. I probably survived because I was all ramped up with some evil chaos shit, and you’re just… you…you don’t die easily. We have a lot in common we don’t realize. Aside from being monsters and needing a vacation, lots. Now I just feel stupid.” Vicki sighed.

  “Why…I’m fine as hell, anyone alone with me would be both annoyed and constantly horny. Nobody’s that straight. Plus, a black hole should have killed both of us.” Gizzy bragged, arrogantly, though accurately.

  “No, I mean…I agreed to this mission because I thought it was…you trying to rekindle something. I thought we had something special enough that you planned a whole mission for me. You really are just doing a weapons testing run, and I was available, aren’t you?” Vicki said face-palming and feeling embarrassed.

  “No, I could have brought a lot of people, I could have done the DNA testing on your clone in a test tube where you couldn’t go ape-shit and kill anyone, and get the cure that way slightly slower. I just…really felt like we had something unresolved and didn’t want additional company at risk. Why do I feel like I’m just being informed of the plan I know I planned? Why do I feel like...uneasy?”

  “Why do I have nightmares about the Delmar tunnels and something hunting me, followed by me waking up bloody and Jack dead?” Vicki sighed. “It feels real until I wake up to the real nightmare.”

  “Refill?” asked the bartender.

  “Can we talk in front of him?” Vicki asked.

  “That’s just 3R as a hologram bartender. That even doesn’t count. He’s not even real people. He just looks like one. Mystery aside, I really did just feel like I needed a vacation from everyone, and you seemed like you needed one too. For some reason, I felt like you being here didn’t count as intrusion. Goddamnit, we did have an affair and die together, didn’t we?” Gizzy huffed.

  “Must have been one hell of an affair if I remember things from a mission you didn’t send me the memory of. Something otherworldly?” Vicki said, placing a hand on Gizzy’s shoulder, lightly tapping her black painted nails.

  “No, that can’t be it. You’re talking about some form of love that transcends reality and can jump across space. That’s just paradoxical and stupid. Nothing could do that except a plot-hole, and I have software that can detect the proximity of those. So unless we both just happened to miss something huge or ran into something huge, this is just a weird coincidence or unknown anomaly unrelated to the fact that we had some kind of affair before the memory wipe. If you think true love is so powerful it literally breaks cannon and somehow WE are soul-mates, you’re more brain-damaged than I am. We’re just single and uniquely damaged monsters, who ended up the last crew on a ship in very lonely open space. Now we both have repressed feelings that have been buried, and we’re both alone. You’re horny because your vampire sexuality is just ramping up the drugs in your freshly cloned body, and I’m horny because I’m just like that. The only mystery is how the hell did the memory transfer happen?”

  “So you’re saying you brought me out here alone instead of on a small team, because of a feeling, and because that feeling isn’t some timespace breaking true love, we can’t even try this?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “Oh no, we can absolutely try this, I was waiting for the right moment for a move for ten minutes now. I’m just saying: this is what it is, it’s not destiny and true love conquering reality itself, it’s just two people with common repressed memories, who were SO desperately in need of a vacation and a rebound fuck, that we cloned ourselves into space again without even a clear objective. It’s not like me to wing it on a mission. Frankly, I don’t know why I’m acting so impulsive. I want your expectations realistic and your delusions aside. I’m a firm believer in comparing insanity levels before consenting. If you’re actually more insane than me by a significant margin, this could be regrettable.” Gizzy huffed.

  “Trust me, you’re definitely less sane and more loaded than me. You wanna find a room or…” Vicki shrugged.

  “We literally have a whole ship. There are not even locks on the doors because it’s mostly one big room and most of the walls are holograms. There’s not even a real bar here. We’re still on the bridge.”

  “Right…” Vicki said suddenly climbing the bar and grabbing Gizzy’s face in both hands, rolling her on top of her and the bar, as the bartender casually cleared the drinks. “Should we…tell the bar-tender to leave? I don’t know how holograms work?” Vicki panted.

  “He literally doesn’t exist and his default setting that I programmed, is to go sit in the Cuck-chair and just watch.”

  “Yea okay.” Vicki shrugged, yanking her down and wrapping her legs around Gizzy. The bartender casually strolled to the corner, sipping his Mai-tai and getting comfortable in the holographic chair, popcorn in hand and 3d glasses slowly placing on his nose, as the lights lowered and the pink bar lighting glowed dimly.

  “Just promise me one thing.” Gizzy said, pinning her hands back lightly.

  “What’s that?” Vicki grinned.

  “That if this doesn’t work out or go anywhere interesting, we don’t get shitty about it and fight constantly.”

  “Relax, it’s just casual sex and seeing how things go. We couldn't be more set up for this if we planned it. It’s not gonna be weird in the morning.” Vicki assured, leaning up to meet her lips, tongues and fangs crossing paths as the bartender’s smile slowly faded from perverted hologram prop to a far darker smile. A strange orange glow gently beaming from the sides of the glasses as he reached back and flipped the mood lighting from Gizzy’s programmed pink, to a far more ominous sodium orange.