Grace curls up under her blanket world. Yuki doesn’t sound gentle or soft or hesitant. She doesn’t know Grace has been falling apart and doesn’t treat her like she has. It’s freeing.

“Hello?” Yuki says. “God, you didn’t really call me on your death bed, did you? That’s gross.”

Grace closes her eyes so tight that fireworks burst behind her eyelids. “No, just my regular bed.” Her thoughts are still racing, and she plucks one out. “Did you ever hear about the Opportunity Mars Rover?”

There’s a weighted silence. “Is that your kind of science? Mars rovers?”

“Not me,” Grace says. “I still think it’s fascinating.” She pauses. “Do you want to hear about it? The Mars Rover?”

“Tell me,” Yuki says.

“They named it Opportunity. It was only supposed to survive for ninety days,” Grace says, like a quiet eulogy. “But it stayed and did its mission for fifteen years. Because it had a plan, you know. And when you have a plan, you don’t fuck it up. You keep going.”

Yuki clears her throat softly. “That sounds like a lot of pressure.”

“It is,” Grace murmurs. “It had like arthritis, you know? I mean, not really, it’s a robot but—”

“I get it,” Yuki says. There’s shuffling and creaking and then Yuki’s voice, low and muffled like she, too, has entered her own blanket world. “Tell me some more about it.”

“It started forgetting stuff,” Grace says. “Like, information it was supposed to send back to the command center. I’m sure it was hard. It’s hard when you have a plan. Plans are so goddamn hard.”

Yuki doesn’t say anything, so Grace keeps going. Her words trip over one another. “There was a dust storm,” she says. “And then the temperature dropped. And it couldn’t—sometimes you fight so hard to follow what you’re supposed to do, but it’s hard and you can’t.”

“Yeah,” Yuki says. “Life is shit like that.” There’s more shuffling, and Yuki’s voice drops to almost a whisper. “What happened to it?”

“Died, as much as rovers can.” Grace sniffles. “The last message it sent to Earth was about its measurements of power production and the atmospheric opacity. Both were critical.”

“I’m a waitress,” Yuki murmurs. “I have no idea what any of that means.”

“God, sorry.” She clutches her blankets tight. “The team behind the rover simplified its message, you know. It’s kind of ridiculous, that we anthropomorphized this machine so much, but I can tell you what they translated it to if you want.”

“I want.”

“‘My battery is low, and it’s getting dark,’” Grace says quietly. “Those were the last words of a Mars Rover that was only supposed to survive for ninety days. It followed its plan until it couldn’t anymore.” Grace wipes her eyes. Little hiccups of grief come for plans followed and plans dismantled and in need of repair.

“Hey,” Yuki says. “Can I tell you something?”

“Yeah.”

“I feel like that little fucking robot sometimes, I think. I feel like I’m sending my last message out into the universe, and I’m hoping that someone is listening. I think that’s why I started my radio show. So I could talk about all the things that lurk in the dark that reminded me of me, and I would know that someone, even one person, was listening.”

Grace swallows hard and pulls the covers up even more to hide the smallest rays of the afternoon sun.

“Grace Porter,” Yuki says. “Are you there?”

Are you there? It’s the question that starts every session of Yuki’s radio show.

When Grace first listened, it felt directed at her.

Hello, lonely creatures. Are you there?

Now it is.

“Yuki Yamamoto,” Grace says, voice scratchy and stuffy.

“Yeah?”

“My battery is low,” she confesses, and the hurt of it unveils like a thorned flower. “And it’s getting so dark.”

She tells Yuki she had a plan, a good plan, and when she got to the end, there was no trophy with her name etched on it. There was no welcome committee thanking her for all that she had sacrificed to get here. There were no offers waiting for her. There is just Grace Porter with a piece of paper that says doctor and another that says married.

She stays curled up through all of it. She stays folded in, protecting the soft, vulnerable parts of herself from the world and her unrelenting brain. She stays with the phone low on speaker and her knees pulled up to her chest. Yuki stays with her.

“That sounds really hard,” Yuki says, like it’s a fact and not pity. It makes Grace relax. “It must be scary, right, getting to the end and realizing how much more work there is to do.”

“Everyone tells me what I need, what I should do,” Grace says, “but I don’t even know. The responsible thing would be to keep pushing. To keep applying for jobs and promoting my research and forcing them to see me, to hear me. That’s the responsible thing, right?”

“Okay, so not to sound like another person trying to fix your problems with a hammer,” Yuki says slowly, “but who said you had to be responsible? I mean, you have a doctorate, and you’re—” She pauses. “Shit, how old are you?”