The Waitress

“Just coffee, I think,” said I, looking up at her, connecting eyes.

“Are you sure?” she replied.

An unexpected brightness glimmered behind her smile, just a hint of a sunspark. A small star in this icy void - probably the only one - and magnetic. “Toast? Omelet?”

Traditionally quick to dismiss the chitchat of these friendly deep space debutantes in favor of protecting my own limited funds, their objectives plainly obvious as they stood there with the upper viewports literally looking down on them in all their unattainable oppressive blackness, the hope of credits dancing in their amphetamine-soaked pupils as they swallowed pride hour after hour to serve outlaws and runaways like me, this time was different. Just as I moved to dash her life’s endless hopes of escape, something stalled my reflexes.

There was no way of knowing, of course, but there was a hint of curiosity about this creature. A mental image appeared - a small child who goes walking in the woods and comes across a discovery. Suddenly wealthy with invincible excitement, the child runs home to tell everybody about this great new thing she found, this thing nobody had ever known about before, while the smile she brings with her back through the neighborhood is the true discovery, and a treasure enriching all who happened to peek out between the bars of their living room windows. In how many of these hangouts - noisy, distant, sullen - had I sat in and eaten hideous inedible masses posing as sausage omelets? How many checkerboard-floor hideouts, sticky with starch and disinfectant, had my boots disgraced and received a terrible cut of chicken and llama-steak and then been demanded an offering of ill-earned payment?

Why did this girl seem genuinely happy?

“All right, just let me know if you change your mind!” she announced, packing the notepad into her apron and skating backwards. “We just got some fresh llamas in from Theta Sector! Just sayin’!”

“Theta?”

Her knowing nod said it all as the rest of her disappeared behind the counter toward the back half of the shop. Having possession of rare wisdom, perhaps it was the fresh supplies and only the fresh supplies that seem to have nullified the irrepressible disdain that usually inhabited the hearts of young servants stuck indefinitely within these roles. Could their lives be so small in scope that such a miniscule treat could cause such sincere joy?

Maybe today was her last day. Maybe after having applied her charms to the last fugitive heading out to the vast nothingness beyond the nearby USN outpost, her efforts had been rewarded with a promised “place” on a salt barge or a mining cruiser. Or perhaps she was looking at a very long vacation that started tomorrow. She had saved up for 1,000 turns and was now thrilled to be able to throw in the greasy apron and step out of the even greasier skates and join a ferry to the outpost, where both hyper-stimulations and yawning numbing agents lay on tap to help dismiss all sense of time for the entirety of her week off.

Or maybe she was just drunk?

Ironically, as I sat there seeing my own reflection in the viewport, thoughts relating to imprisonment or being a fugitive swimming around in my brain, never did it occur to me that the waitress that day could have been happy for genuine reasons - that perhaps the discovery she had made was inside her own heart, and that the icy void beyond was nothing more to obsess over than an innocently spilled cup of coffee. At no point did I consider the possibility that she was happy because that’s simply who she was, and no amount of stickiness below could infect it. If not even flat-faced runaways who don’t order food and don’t leave tips could shake away her smile, clearly there was something of value in this place.

But what was it? Was it something in between the horsepower hum of air scrubbers and the perverted groans of pressured pipes and the decadent hiss of a fresh llama steak, or did it live, like a treasure, in the heart of a human? The most depressing, least ambitious alien species of them all?