Mimi: Tss-ts-ts.

Ah-ah-ah. Nooope. Come on.

Pet Owner: Rudy! Hey. Hold still for Dr. Mimi.

I’m sorry, he’s been out of sorts since he started coughing.

Mimi: It’s okay, our little man’s just havin’ a time. Come on, buddy!

Rudy! You’ve been coming to see me for two thousand years. Don’t act brand new.

Theeeere we go. Good boy!

Okay, you can sit him down.

Mimi: He’s just got a case of kennel cough. Have you boarded him anywhere recently?

Pet Owner: No, not for a while.

Mimi: Come in contact with any other dogs?

Pet Owner: No, not really. He sniffs other dogs on his walks sometimes, actually.

Mimi: Do you go on walks with him?

Pet Owner: He usually just goes around the block by himself.

Mimi: Well, he’s contagious right now, so you may wanna, and I hate to say this, but you might wanna put him on a leash for the next couple weeks. Just to make sure he doesn’t–

Hey!

Hey get from under there! There’s medical waste in that bin, he doesn’t need to stick his nose in there.

Pet Owner: Rudy! Sorry about that. He’s always been hard-headed. I know he knows, too.

Mimi: They never get old.

Pet Owner: Never ever.

Mimi: So what we can do is, Carrie at the desk can get you a scrip for some antibiotics. It comes in a dropper and you should have enough for seven days. It’s actually a little sweet, so he’ll probably take it just fine. But if you have any trouble you can just mix it in with his dinner.

Lizzie: Mimi! Got a call on two.

Mimi: Thank you!

You should be all set.

Pet Owner: Ugh, he’s gonna hate that leash. We need to go pick one up, any tips?

Mimi: Only ones I recommend against are the retractable leashes, they tend to send mixed messages. You want one with a fixed length, especially since he’s not used to it. Needs to know his boundaries. Make sure he keeps some distance from other pups if you can.

Pet Owner: Oh okay, yeah that makes sense.

Come on, bud. Thanks Mimi! Say bye!

Mimi: Bye, little man! Too cute.

Tooooo cute.

Phone: *CLICK*

Mimi: Dr. Mackenzie.

Juice: HEYYYYYYYY

Mimi: OH HI!!!

Juice: how’s your wednesday

Mimi: Going good. Only a few patients today.

Juice: you run into any dogs named Grimaldi

Mimi: No, why?

Juice: ah nothin it was a joke

Mimi: Ah, okay.

Juice: basically the story goes, a man named Grimaldi is feeling depressed. way down in the dumps. so he goes to see a doctor

and the doctor says, “ah, i have just the cure for you! you must go into town and see Grimaldi the clown! he can really put on a show. i was just there the other night and laughed the entire time. yes sir, Grimaldi the clown will cheer you right up!”

and Grimaldi responds, “that is also my name! what a coincidence! i’ll go see him tonight!” and he goes and has a great time and feels a lot better

Mimi: Now, you know that’s not the way that story goes.

Juice: it’s the way mine goes

Mimi: There’s no arc! Nothing, you know, nothing develops!

Juice: yeah it does he feels better

Mimi: What’s the point, though? What’s the story trying to say?

Juice: nothing

sometimes a story can just be some shit that happened. i refuse to have a point and you can’t make me

Ten: He’s right, you can’t.

Mimi: Oh, is this Pioneer 10?

Ten: Yes, hi!

Mimi: So happy we’ve finally met! Juice has told me a lot about you.

Ten: Oh, well you know, you may actually remember me from some of my lectures in the arts program. I did a series at Georgia Southern!

Mimi: Oh!

Mimi: Oh yeah yeah yeah, no yeah. Definitely.

Ten: Anyway! We just got done learning about “the Sharks.”

Juice: yeah Mimi you’re becoming a little bit of a celebrity out here in space

Mimi: A celebrity, huh! Well, don’t go telling too many people.

Juice: as a bowl game official i would never disclose your identity to the public

Mimi: Uh, excuse you!

Juice: oh uh

ahem

As a bowl game official, I would never disclose your identity to the public.

Mimi: Thank you, Commish.

Juice: so actually i wanted to bother you about something. we got Pioneer 9 up here, you know they’ve been in hibernation a long time and just woke up a few weeks ago

was wondering if i could introduce y’all? Nine’s way into this game and i’m just tryin to show em around

Mimi: Oh congrats to them! Yeah, I’d be happy to. You know what, I was just about to break for lunch.

Juice: now good?

Mimi: Now’s good!

Juice: ok right on i’ll patch em through. seeya Mimi!

Mimi: See you, talk soon!

Nine: Hello?

Mimi: Hi, is this Pioneer 9?

Nine: Hi! Yes, that’s me. You can call me Nine.

Mimi: I’m Mimi. So nice to talk to you! The commish said you just woke up.

Nine: At the end of September, yeah.

Mimi: What’s that like? Is it tough getting your bearings again?

Nine: Actually, not really. It was a lot better this time. The first time was back in 17776, that was way tougher.

Mimi: Mhmm, I remember that. Juice has told me a lot about it.

They spent a lot of time looking for you. Lot of time. He told me that at one point, they were sure you were gone for good. But then your sister kept lookin’ and lookin’, and I guess she found you.

Nine: Yeah, sometimes I can’t believe she did it. Not counting the booms, I’m about three feet tall and three feet wide.

Mimi: Oh wowwww. I would’ve guessed you were a lot larger than that. I guess I hear “space probe” and I think “spaceship.”

Nine: Yeah, Juice is a whole lot bigger than I am. Not that it matters, really. We all feel pretty tiny out here.

Mimi: I do too sometimes. This field’s about 134,000 miles long in total, enough to go around the globe five times.

Nine: At least it’s only that, you know. At least it ends.

Mimi: Yeah.

I don’t look up a whole lot. The world’s already too big as it is, you know?

Nine: So you’re one of the Sharks?

Mimi: I guess it’s technically right to say that. One of one.

Nine: …

You’re it?

Mimi: Mhmm.

Nine: People think you’re like twelve people.

Mimi: Oh, I know. No, it’s just me.

You better not tell anybody.

Nine: Of course I won’t.

Mimi: Almost nobody knows. Commish does, of course. A lot of my team doesn’t even know, that’s how secret we’re trying to keep it. I mean, they know I’m on the Georgia Southern roster, they just figure I’m a lookout.

Hey, sorry if you hear some noise, I’m headed out for lunch. Today’s fish sandwich day.

Nine: Sounds great.

Mimi: Yeah, Commish loves ‘em. You like food?

Nine: I mean

I can’t eat food.

Mimi: <Lizzie! Headed to lunch, you want anything?>

Lizzie: <Nah, I brought a salad.>

Mimi: I only ask because he loooooves food. I don’t really get it. He always asks me, what’s in the sandwich? How’s it taste? Does this reheat well? Does that pair well with this?

I guess for him that’s the closest he can get to eating, other than sucking up the sunbeams. It makes me a little sad for him sometimes.

Nine: Do you two talk a lot?

Mimi: Yeah, you know, every so often. He loves to make friends. With the players in particular. You know you’re his friend if he drops the whole Commish thing and talks to you like normal.

Honestly? I think part of the reason he made this game was so he could have friends.

He missed y’all. I don’t think he wants you to know too much about that, though.

Shit, hold on. Gotta catch the light.

Mimi: HOO!

Okay.

Nine: You’re quick!

Mimi: Gotta keep my cardio up. Not a lot of places to run on the Columbus part of the field.

Nine: So are you undercover or something?

Mimi: Well, yes and no. At first that was the whole idea. I was a vet tech way back when, so getting a job here at the clinic was a great place to kinda lay low. It’s close to the water, so I could sneak off after work and go hit the lake.

But you know, no matter who you are, if you get a job somewhere on the field, people are always gonna be like, “ohhh, you play football. You’re just trying to be cute about it.” And if they notice you never leave the field, they’ll figure you out.

I can’t do any of the normal stuff. I can’t drive a car, I can’t take the bus. And no matter what, if you cross a highway on foot, people are always gonna look at you funny. Even if there’s a crosswalk. Doesn’t matter.

Nine: It’s definitely a car country.

Mimi: Ohhh yeah. Especially down here. Sorry, hang on one second.

<Hiiii! Good, I’m doing good. Could you get me a fish sandwich, pickles, no tartar sauce, and do y’all have fries in the fryer? OK great. And then just a medium Sprite.>

<Oh! Uhh hold on … yes actually, could I get two hundred dollars? Actually sorry, better make it three hundred. Ha! Yeah, I have bingo Friday night. Thank youuu.>

Okay, sorry.

Nine: So can I … can we back up a little bit? I just want to figure out how there’s just one of you and everybody thinks there’s five or six or twelve of you.

Mimi: Absolutely.

So Georgia Southern is what they call a “lightning rod.” We’ve got one of the longest fields in the whole game.

Mimi: That’s great if you really know what you’re doing, and you come in with a plan of attack and a plan of defense on day one.

Damn, that was fun.

Nine: Opening day?

Mimi: Yeah. I wasn’t on the team back then, I actually didn’t commit to Southern until about eight hundred years ago. It was on every channel, though. Every team had 125 players, you know, and they all started on their home fields. It looked like one of those fun runs. Everybody just bookin’ it out of the stadium at once.

My mother was on the Southern track team way back when, so she signed up as a defensive back. The program’s playbook at the start was basically to just wait for other teams to pop footballs loose, then close in on ‘em once they were out in the open. It wasn’t a bad idea. I mean, this field has 78 intersections.

Nine: Yeah, and if you stay to your home field, you actually get to work all 125 of your players into the playbook, right? Including the 25 who have to stay on the home field.

Mimi: Exactly, exactly. So what they did is, they broke into eight teams of 11. One each for Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. Three for Texas, two for New Mexico, two for Arizona. That left another 37 players left over, and those 37 just scouted various other fields. That’s a lot more scouts than more teams use. They served as sort of an early-warning system to let the rest of the team know when an offense was rolling in with a ball.

Nine: Did it work?

Mimi: For a while, yeah! It worked pretty good. In Year Two they picked up a ball in Texas. Year 77 they got another, Year 190 they got another.

My mother got one in Dallas, actually.

Mimi: Dallas was a real hot part of the field back then. A lot of big programs have fields running through it. Texas, TCU, Baylor, Nebraska has one that comes all the way down. They called it “Powerball.” Footballs were just bouncing around all over. Of course, since Southern only had 11 players in the area, they were usually squeezed out of the action.

One day, though.

One day, those 11 wake up one morning and see they’ve moved up on the scoreboard. Someone’s trying to carry a football through their field. Who knows where, you know, but Mama goes up to a rooftop to see if there’s anything to see.

And sure enough, she sees a TCU team stomping their way. Not even trying to be quiet about it, the way you might if you’re on another team’s field. There were about 70 of ‘em. And they just thought they were all that, you know?

Southern didn’t like that. So they said, hell, let’s make ‘em work for it at least. Let’s line ‘em up and make ‘em play some football if they’re gonna just parade through our field like this.

When they do, TCU’s all crabby about it. They’re annoyed. So they line up in a, excuse me but I’m gonna curse here, they line up in a “fuck-you” formation.

Mimi: They line up in what they call the phalanx. The idea is that the whole team just marches forward and bulldozes everybody, slowly but surely. And the quarterback just kinda strolls along behind em.

Nine: Yeah, I’m looking up the replay. This is gross.

Mimi: It’s some real knucklehead stuff. It’s basically what you do if you wanna completely disrespect somebody. If you’re a big team who runs into a little team and you just wanna make ‘em feel like dirt for even trying to challenge you.

And it went about as you’d guess. Southern put ten players on the line, but it didn’t matter. They just got trampled. Mama said it was so slow, it was like watching road getting paved.

But you know, there’s a saying. Every coach says it now. “Count your opponent.” No matter what, no matter how outmatched they are, count your opponent.

And this is why they say that.

Mimi: Mama told me later she was scared as Hell on that rooftop. Nobody wants to jump off an 18-story building. I don’t care how good the nanos are at what they do, it’s gonna hurt some. And it’s not like you can jump a couple hundred feet and just decide it won’t scare you.

But she’s there to play, and she’s the only Southern player in Dallas who has long jump experience. So she walks out her steps, kinda like a placekicker would, and starts way back on the rooftop. She listens for the snap count. And of course, because TCU just wanted to disrespect Southern, their snap count was just a countdown from ten to one.

Nobody does that. Not anymore, not ever.

Her plan was to jump the line. From way back on the roof, she couldn’t actually see ‘em. So once she heard the count get down to five, she started running.

A little after it got to two, she made the jump.

And the instant the ball was snapped, she crossed the line of scrimmage.

Mimi: When there’s an impact like that, the nanos kinda bubble up around you and sweep you backward. Both my mama and the quarterback somersaulted about 20 times and fell into the creek behind them. She recovered the fumble and ran with it. Nobody could catch her.

TCU’s quarterback quit after that. Said the terror of it was too much for him. He walked right off the field, right then and there, and never came back.

Nine: Does Southern still have that ball?

Mimi: No. No telling where it is.

We had a little mini-dynasty back then. Actually had seven footballs at one time, which was a whole lot back then. But that just made us a target.

Georgia State’s always hated us, always. And about 700 years into the game, they gave us the bulldozer. You know what that is?

Nine: No.

Mimi: The bulldozer is about the meanest thing you can do in football. It’s only been done a couple times. It’s technically legal, but it’s so unsportsmanlike that every team in the country came together at some point and agreed never to do it.

When you bulldoze somebody, you take all one hundred of your standard players and you put them on someone else’s field. Those players start at one end, mark off a distance of 100 yards, and search those hundred yards up and down. One player per yard. Every player just paces from sideline to sideline, combing every square inch, kicking over every rock and bucket and everything else.

They do that for an hour. Then they move upfield and do the same for the next hundred yards. Twelve hours a day, this is all they did.

They did this on our field for seven years.

Mimi: You cannot hide a football from this kind of operation. It’s impossible. Doesn’t even matter that our field is almost four million yards.

Now If a team is bulldozing your field, you can send your own team after ‘em, try to slow ‘em down. But then they’ve successfully tied your team up. The door’s wide open for some other team to come in and rob you.

Nine: Did they find any footballs doing that?

Mimi: That’s the thing. They didn’t. But by doing that, they forced us to scramble, to take our footballs and run off to other fields. From there, we were eventually picked off, one after another.

Nine: So Georgia State didn’t benefit at all.

Mimi: No. All they wanted to do was destroy us, and they did. We had no footballs by the end of it. Pure malice.

My mother quit after that. She couldn’t take it. She called me crying one night and told me, “Mimi, I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.”

Mimi: Fast forward a few hundred years, of course, she feels some kind of way about it when I sign up myself. She told me, “don’t waste time with that game. It’ll only make you bitter.”

I didn’t listen, because you never listen to your parents. I took a lesson from her, from that jump off the rooftop. The only way to play this game, the only way I know how to play it, is to terrify.

Nine: I’m sorry if this is rude to say, but that doesn’t seem like you.

Mimi: No?

Nine: No. You seem like a really nice person.

Mimi: Well, thank you. I mean, I think I am.

I wish I could just nice my way into what I want, but you can’t. Someone will always step on you. You gotta cause nightmares.

Nine: It seems like you do. People talk about you like you’re a ghost.

Nine: How do you do it?

Mimi: It might be more useful to explain to you how not to let me catch you.

Don’t try to cross the lake during the day. It’s too easy for me. I’m too good at timing you. I can stay underwater a long, long time, and I know exactly how long it will take you to get here. How far away can you spot a bamboo reed sticking out of the water? That’s how much warning you’ll have. Most never notice it.

Don’t make noise. Don’t use a canoe. Use a rowboat. Cut the water with your blades like you’re carving a turkey, slowly, with deliberation.

Don’t row quickly, you couldn’t make a mistake worse than that. I will hear you from far off. Even if I’ve never seen you, I know exactly how you sound.

Don’t talk. You can get away with whispering, but don’t talk.

Don’t go out to the lakes by yourself. I’m too frightening for you to be alone.

Mimi: Don’t try to cross near sunup or sundown. I’ll pick you right out. You’ll be the tallest thing in the lake. I will see you from miles away.

Don’t sneeze. Don’t cough. Especially not at night. As quiet as it seems to you, it’s quieter to me.

None of this advice will save you, but it will buy you enough time to prepare yourself, and remember that you won’t drown, and I won’t hurt you.

But I do need to scare you, because I need you to think there are many of me, and none of us want you here.

If I can help it, it will never happen the same way twice. Maybe, a few miles south of what used to be Vicksburg, I’ll tap on the hull, just soft enough to make you wonder whether you’re hearing things. I’ll follow you. You wouldn’t guess how fast I can move underwater, or how long I can stay down there.

Once I’ve terrified you enough, you’ll go in the water. Maybe you’ll see my knuckles as they grab the lip of the hull and flip you. Maybe you’ll hear knocking from all sides of the boat. Maybe I’ll grab your arm, hook your elbow, and rip you right out. I haven’t decided yet.

Mimi: I might leave your boat, or I might shove it far off the field, and your choice then will be whether to swim home or quit.

I don’t care if you have a football or not. I don’t want you here.

Pardon my language, but get the fuck out of my lake.

Mimi: <Yes! Fish sandwich and medium fries? Yes, that’s me. Thank youuu!>

Nine: Oh, are you about to eat? I don’t want to bother you.

Mimi: No no, it’s fine. As long as you don’t mind me eating.

Nine: So you’re … don’t take this the wrong way, I hope, but you’re kind of a monster.

Mimi: Yeah. I sort of am. My day job kind of helps me balance that out. Ha! I mean I spend all day taking care of these pups and I think, “hey, I’m not so bad.”

But like I said, you know, it’s the only way to play this game. I mean, it’s gotten us where we are.

Mimi: Speaking of! Wowwww.

Nine: Looking at the scoreboard?

Mimi: Yeahhhhh. I haven’t looked in a while. Wow.

What happened to Georgia Tech? Oh my God, they’re all the way down there! What happened?

You probably know what happened.

Nine: Yeah, I do. I can’t tell you, obviously.

Mimi: No, of course.

I have no idea when this game is ever gonna end. I mean, all I know for sure is that our 11 balls are enough to get us into second place, so all I can guess is that Michigan State isn’t TOO too far ahead. If we’ve been playing for two thousand years and the #1 team only has around 20 footballs, we’re gonna be here a while.

But Lord, I can’t wait to hear all the stories once it’s all over. It’s almost the best part of all this. All the drama, the errors, the bad calls ...

Nine: And you’ll finally be able to tell everyone who “The Sharks” are.

Mimi: CANNOT. WAIT. For that. I need them to know that a vet tech in Columbus did this to ‘em.

Nine: So you really go days without looking at the scoreboard? This happened around a week ago.

Mimi: Yeah … it’s kind of a long offseason for me right now.

See, the first phase of this was just roaming the lakes and picking up footballs. All 11 of those came from me. I spooked teams so much, they stopped even trying to advance balls through the water.

Then it was phase two: scaring the Holy Ghost into everybody who even tried crossing the lakes, ball carrier or not. We wanted to do that to sort of push the action up north.

Mimi: Once I basically took the lakes out of play, it created a choke point up in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and that’s fine by us. Let ‘em play up there and leave us alone. Meanwhile, we can enjoy this big shiny #2 ranking. Helps a lot with recruiting, and with the heat off us, we can spend these few hundred years coaching and training and planning.

Nine: Oh, so that’s why you keep them all on your field! For the ranking! So you can recruit.

Mimi: Exactly right, that’s exactly right. By the 20400s I expect us to be the #1 team in the country. We’re in great shape to make a run, I think.

Nine: Can I ask where you’re hiding them?

Mimi: Underwater, in the middle of the lake right near the Mississippi-Louisiana border. I keep them in an old silo down there. Of course, I swim down there and check on ‘em once a month or so. Don’t need ‘em workin’ loose and floating all over the lake.

Nine: Seems smart.

Nine: I’m having so much fun talking to you.

Mimi: Aww! Well I love talking to you too!

You know what cracks me up about y’all? It’s how great at conversation you are. Commish had to learn how to be social over the years, but you haven’t been up that long, right?

Nine: Well

There’s the me who’s been conscious for a total of a few weeks or so, but then there’s the me who kind of ambiently absorbed transmissions from Earth for all those thousands of years.

Mimi: Oh, TV shows and whatnot? Talk radio?

Nine: Yeah.

But there’s the third me, too. The one who absorbed things before I fully really existed as me. I was just a bucket of instruments.

The onboard memory I launched into space with is core rope memory. You know how that works?

Mimi: No idea.

Nine: Well, those of us who were built in the ‘60s presented a problem. Traditional data storage was really fragile and unreliable. And if it messed up, it wasn’t as though they could go out there and fix me.

So they literally sewed me some memory. I still have it, of course. It’s all these bundles of thin little wires sewn into a board. If a wire is sewn through a little ring, that’s a one. If it passes outside the ring, it’s a zero.

Nine: It took, and I apologize in advance for cursing—

Mimi: No, no problem.

Nine: It took FUCKING FOREVER.

Nine: They sent them off to a factory for women to do it.

Mimi: Naturally.

Nine: They had to literally sew the program into the board, strand by strand. Two of them would sit opposite from one another and check each other’s work. If you made even one error out of countless thousands upon thousands – if you mistakenly looped even a single zero instead of a one – the entire thing was ruined. The steadiness of hand it required, the artistry, the unreasonable attention to detail it took, I can’t even begin to imagine.

Nine: Of course, this isn’t rewritable memory, the sort of memory you usually think of. Everything was hardwired.

Nine: What no one quite understood at the time is that everything makes an imprint, however atomic or faint it might be.

Mimi: Mhmm, I’ve seen documentaries. Except it stuck with y’all because …

Nine: Right, because they shot us in space shortly thereafter. There was nothing out here to erode it.

So, you know, fast-forward thousands of years, I wake up, and I have nothing to do but sort through these mountains upon mountains of imprints that are all over me. In a sense, I got to “hear” what people were saying while they were around me, or at least, the collection of parts that became me.

They talked about a lot of things. A lot about their children. A lot of telling each other they were taking a lunch break. That’s something I came to understand very early on: people love lunch. They interrupt everything they’re doing just for lunch.

Mimi: I can’t blame ‘em. Making you sounds like it’s hard work.

Nine: Yeah.

Nine: I sort of think of them as my godparents, all of those people who built me. The researchers at Ames, the technicians at Cape Kennedy, those women in the factory.

All that time, all those threads, weaving through something that must have been far too confusing to enjoy.

Mimi: I think that’s love.

Nine: I know that’s love.

They didn’t know what I’d be or who I’d be, but they loved me.

If you read human history up to the year 1868, you’d never imagine that people were just a hundred years from launching me into space with all these sophisticated instruments and experiments. I feel like I wasn’t “supposed” to happen that soon, that it should have taken hundreds more years to figure out something like me and send me into the cosmos.

I have about as much onboard memory as a dishwasher, maybe a little more. And they had to sew it by hand even to get that much. It feels like they shouldn’t have been able to do it.

Mimi: That’s how much they loved you, isn’t it? That’s how badly they wanted to bring you into the universe.

Nine: It is. I think about them a lot. I remember them all. Some made it to today, a lot of them didn’t.

They’ll always be a part of me.

Mimi: I know what you mean.

One thing I’ve enjoyed about this game is that it forces you to walk on lines, literally walk on lines, that you never would’ve walked before, and get to know people you never would have known.

Nine: You go around the country? Just for fun?

Mimi: Oh yeah, when it’s not fishing season. I’ll leave the lake for months at a time, let ‘em get comfortable enough to start trying it again. Once in a while I’ll use that time to just roam around.

A lot of places are special to me. A couple are really special.

One’s up in Fairhaven, Ohio. It’s right off the Miami of Ohio field, it only misses it by a little bit.

Nine: The “Bunker Hill House”?

Mimi: Mhmm.

It was a stop on the Underground Railroad. There’s a creek that runs behind the building. The ones who escaped had to follow the creek north to find it, it was about the only way you could make it through this part of Ohio without being seen.

And you know how tired they must have been. I don’t think I’ll ever know what it’s like to be that tired. When they got here, they got a meal, and they could sleep in the attic or the cellar before making it the rest of the way to Canada.

One day I’ll knock on the door and visit. For now, I can only get close. I can see it through the trees, it’s a bright brick building you can make out from far off. It’s enough for me.

Mimi: There’s another place, too.

It’s a town called Free Charles in Kentucky. Well, it’s called Charleston now, but it was originally Free Charles. And naturally, it was named after a freed slave named Charles, who started a tavern there.

This is all just based on things I’ve looked up, but he and his wife, his wife’s name was Maria, and they supposedly made the best food anywhere. People would come from miles and miles around, trying to beat the sunset and get there in time for dinner.

The whole town sprang up around those two.

The tavern’s not there anymore, but right at the edge of the Alabama A&M field, there’s a church.

Are you a religious person?

Nine: No, not really.

Mimi: Mhmm. I go in and out. I don’t know if I’ll ever stay one way or the other.

But the music ...

Mimi: I’ve been through there a few times. The last time was about ten years ago, and of course, I just had to roll through there on a Sunday morning, right in the middle of service.

I just sat there in the woods and listened. I had to stop myself from walking right off the field and going inside.

Nine: Do you have much out-of-bounds time saved up?

Mimi: I do. About nine and a half minutes.

I’ve thought about it. My 20,000th birthday is coming up in a couple thousand years. By then, if all this is still going on and I’m still playing, I figure I’ll almost have enough time to sit in for a full service.

Nine: Could be a nice birthday present.

Mimi: Hmm?

Nine: I said, it could be a nice birthday present.

Mimi: Ha. Yeah, it sure would be. Might just do that for myself. If I’m good.

When all this is done I want to go all over and see all these places. It’s funny how all these places can speak to me. Even if they’re silent. Especially if they’re silent. It’s as though everything they built is resting. Having a nice rest. And so are they.

They never could have known all these roads would lead to me, to us. I guess they did know I would live for all of time, in one way or another. They knew that much. They kept hope for ages, and they did it for me, even though they didn’t know me.

I don’t know how I’m here. But I know how I began.

Nine: I’ve been trying to answer that for myself.

I don’t have answers you have, answers for what your purpose is. Not yet. I’m trying to be patient. It’s difficult.

Mimi: I’m sorry, I didn’t catch you.

Nine: I said it’s really difficult.

I have some practice with it. When my sister woke me up for the first time, I got plenty of practice. Lots of time to sit and think, and a lot of things came to me, but a lot hasn’t yet.

Nine: It’s difficult to feel so old, to BE so old, and feel like I have so little wisdom. A lot of things keep me happy, though.

Ten and Juice, I don’t know what I’d do without them.

Nine: I don’t know what I’d do without all of you, either. I love you all for building me, for sending me here, even though you didn’t know what I would become. I love you for being yourselves, and for welcoming me like you have.

Sometimes I hear some of you wonder whether this is Heaven. I think it is. It’s in Heaven I’ll grow up and grow old.

I can’t believe my fortune.

Mimi: Sweetie, I’m sorry, but you’re fading. I can’t make you out.

Nine: What? Not sure what’s going on. Can you hear me?

Mimi: I can tell you’re trying to say something. It’s just not coming through.

Nine: Oh no. Fuck. Come on.

Come the fuck on. Not yet. I thought I had more time than this.

Mimi: Hold on! Hold on. It’s okay.

Nine: God fucking damn it. I’m such a piece of shit. Fucking battery. Come on, no, man, no.

Mimi: Okay, okay, hold on. I hope you can still hear me. Send me uh …

Nine: Fuck.

Mimi: Send me three quick transmissions if you can hear me.

Nine: Okay.

Okay.

Here.

Mimi: Okay good, good, good! Okay so I don’t know what to do right now, so what I’m gonna do right now is call up the Commish, okay?

Nine: Okay.

Mimi: Okay, hold tight.

Juice: yup

Mimi: Hey Commish, listen, I’ve still got Nine on the line here and they’re losing signal.

Juice: ahhh okay

Mimi: Sweetie, I’ve got him on the line.

Juice: can you hear me

Nine: Yeah.

Juice: just like the old days, huh

Nine: Fuck off.

Juice: lol you’re cussin at me ain’t you buddy

Nine: Fuck you

Juice: lol

listen it’s gonna be okay, okay? you’ll be just fine

Mimi: Y’all gonna be okay?

Juice: yeah yeah yeah it’s fine. this happens

Mimi: Oh thank God.

It was so nice to meet you! Talk to you soon, I hope!

Nine: Pleasure was all mine.

Juice: okay hold tight just a minute here, alright