Tonight I will sleep.

How much can two (or more) people synchronise their states of energy?

Bai floated across the room, feeling ill, tired from her travels across the planet’s surface, to-and-from the Orbiter Entertainment Conference Centre circling Mars.

An ancient, well-preserved copy of the Oxford Multilingual Dictionary suspended in a stationary position above Lee’s desk.

“Are you okay?”

Bai shrugged.  “I didn’t sleep well last night, got maybe 2 marshours’ sleep, same the night before.”

“Do you want to practice our dance?”

Bai attempted a weak smile.  “That’s why I’m here.  Let’s do it.”

As they stepped through the first 40 marsecs of their routine repeatedly, they stopped occasionally for a break.

Bai stopped and looked Lee in the eyes.  “Look at this.”

In his thoughts, Lee watched a conversation between Bai and a man whose identity was left blank.

The man walked up to Bai in the conference centre bar.  “I know everything about you.”

“You do.”

“Yeah.  You got that tattoo within the last few weeks, didn’t you?”

“Nope.  Had it for over two years.”

“No you didn’t.  I said I know you.  You just got it.”

“Sorry, but you’re wrong.”

“I missed you.  Where have you been the last two weeks?”

“I was out of town.”

“What were you doing?”

“I was working.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I thought you knew everything about me.”

[The sound of crickets chirping had been inserted from Bai’s longterm memory.]

Bai stopped showing her memory to Lee.  “What do you think of that?”

“That guy…he…”

“He’s the chief of police, that’s who he is.  Thinks his orbiter privileges give him some sort of special abilities.”

“Did you give him that look of yours?”

Bai made a face that said ‘Are you talking to me?’

Lee smiled.  He responded to everyone differently, some making him laugh uncontrollably.  Bai gave him a warm feeling inside just by being herself, cracking her jokes that were so funny to Lee he was embarrassed to let himself let his boyish guffaw snort out loud.  “Did that turn him off?”

“I wish.  He even said he had a special friendship with my boyfriend, said that my boyfriend, being military, was going to leave me.  I told his he was wrong.  My boyfriend is French — French boyfriends have to go on to the next woman — it’s in their DNA.”

Bai sat down, exhausted.  She took a few sips of energy water and a few drops of baby food formula.  “This is the best stuff, no matter what they say.”

Lee nodded.

After their dance showcase practice, they worked on a few moves from a historic dance form called Lindy Hop.

Bai described the best she could how the dance moves should appear in engineering terms, which Lee quickly absorbed.

They cut their practice short because Bai was feeling too weak to go on.

Later that day, Guin met Lee for more dance practice.  They reviewed their previous dance lesson stored on the ISSA Net, seeing where they needed improvement and went from there.

Lee’s empathetic neuron net was extra sensitive to people who triggered his proximity sensor array, most notably Bai and Guin in the last few days.  His brain circuitry surged with pulsating neurochemical signals, flooding his thoughts with old, broken memories, incomplete images and uncategorised emotions, all at the same time.

After the lesson review, Lee allowed his thoughts to relax, leaving unanswered questions from earlier in the week to fade into the background.

However, as they warmed up, Guin sensed Lee’s tense shoulders and arms.  She told him to relax, let their arms connected to their hands form a smiley face.

Lee’s conscious thoughts understood the word “relax” but after a terrible car smashup on Earth when he was a teenager, Lee had forgotten how to translate the word into action for the nerves, muscles, ligaments and tendons of his left arm and shoulder.

He did not have the knowledge to ask Guin what “relax” meant.  He wanted to learn but his thoughts were still disconnected from the past few days of rewiring habitual pathways.

Guin kept working on the dance steps with Lee, slowly working with him to forget what he was doing, no longer thinking but dancing the steps, closing the gap between them and fading Lee’s personal space into nothingness.

Lee could have let the ISSA Net get rid of the annoying brain-muscle connection problems but he was “old skoowuhl” as Shadowgrass called him and liked the challenge of the personal struggle of his current self forming around and against the previous versions of himself left in deadends and byways of his central nervous system.

They knocked out the steps.

Next on Lee’s list was working through the unexplored feelings he had for Guin and Bai, decades old, just as Bai could recall an old man named Marcus she remembered training when the man was a teenager.

There was so much more to learn about them and their shared connections.

But what’s a lifetime for if one can’t return to Earth in one’s thoughts and go wakeboarding every now and then?

Guin and Lee checked in on Shadowgrass to see how his homework was coming along.  Shadowgrass was studying the history of the extinct social system called politics, trying to understand the need for hierarchical bureaucratic layers of society once called government.  “Dad, did we really used to waste so much energy on superfluous levels of managing our species’ resource needs?”

“Yes, son, we did.  That’s why Earth’s climate changed so drastically over a short period of time.  Mismanaged priorities.”

“I’m glad we’re not like that.”

Me, too, son.  Me, too.”

Guin turned to go.  “Sorry, guys, but I’ve got a rover’s load of work to do at the lab.  Lee, please practice the apache move we went over.  I want you to have it down to a science when I get back next sol.”

“Sure thing.  Don’t work too hard.”

“‘Work’?  You mean, don’t have too much fun!”

The three of them laughed at Lee’s slip.  ‘Work’ had almost completely left the common language of Mars, replaced by Martian society’s ability to shift colonisation needs according to the abilities and desires of the nonrobotic inhabitants such as humans.

As Lee rolled into bed alone, he found himself crying, a memory of his father passing through his thoughts.  He still loved his father after all these years, having forgiven his father for unknowingly mistreating his son in his attempt to raise his son the best way he knew how in the moment and based on his personality shaped by his own father’s mistreatment of him.

Living longer didn’t make old memories go away, just more memories to choose from, the earliest ones gaining or fading in strength as memories accumulated and cross-referenced themselves.

His mother didn’t raise a fool, just watched him often make a fool of himself as he grew up.