THE BACK DOOR OF THE BLUE COMET
Sal had run the Blue Comet through eleven thousand breakfast services, and in that time he had learned the exact weight of grief in a man who orders the short stack and then doesn't eat it. He knew which of his regulars took their coffee for the warmth of the cup and not the drink. He knew that Tuesdays were slow and that the slowness was a kind of mercy. What he did not know, and what was ruining his morning, was why the back door of his diner now opened onto nothing at all.
Not the alley. The alley was where the back door was supposed to go — a narrow brick channel with a dented trash can and a cat named Enterprise who Sal had never once fed on purpose. Instead the door swung open on a rectangle of grey. Not fog. Not dark. Grey the way a thing is grey when nobody has bothered to decide what it looks like yet. Sal had stood in the doorway that morning with a bag of coffee grounds and looked out at it and felt something he did not have a word for, because his vocabulary, extensive as it was on the subject of eggs, had never needed one.
Then Marie had gone out through it.
Marie had been waitressing at the Comet since before Sal could remember, which, if Sal was honest with himself, and he tried to be, was not a very long time. She'd gone out to shake a tablecloth, the way she did every morning, and she had stepped into the grey and she had not come back. There had been no scream. There had been a small sound, like a word getting halfway out of a mouth, and then the door had swung shut on its own, and the diner had gone quiet in a way that felt structural, as if a beam had been removed.
By ten o'clock he'd lost two more. A trucker named Dell who'd wandered back looking for the men's room. One of the Kowalski kids, chasing the cat. Sal had started stacking chairs against the back door, which was absurd, because the door opened inward, but a man does what he can.
The woman from Starfleet arrived at half past ten.
He knew her kind on sight — the ones who came in real, who ate his eggs and then wiped their mouths and said computer, save program and walked out through the front like it was nothing, like the front door was a joke they were all in on. This one was young and tired and carried a case of tools that hummed. She had a little gold pin on her chest that she touched sometimes like it itched.
"You the proprietor?" she said.
"I'm the cook," Sal said. "Proprietor's a fancy word for a man who mops."
She almost smiled. She set the case on the counter, right on the counter, where a person eats, and Sal decided not to say anything about it. "Ensign Okafor. I've got a work order. Holosuite four, subroutine's throwing a boundary fault. Your establishment's, uh —" she checked a padd — "leaking assets into unrendered space."
"It's eating my customers," Sal said.
Okafor looked up. Something moved behind her eyes, quick, and was put away. "Yeah," she said. "That."
She worked for a while. Sal made her a coffee she didn't ask for and she drank it without noticing she was drinking it, which was the highest compliment his coffee could receive. She talked to the air. The air talked back in a flat voice that made Sal's teeth hurt, reciting numbers, and Okafor frowned at them and said things like there's your discontinuity and who set the egress vector to null.
"Here's your problem," she said finally. "The back-alley environment didn't load this cycle. Cache got dumped in a maintenance sweep and nobody flagged the diner for a rebuild. So behind that door there's just — nothing. No geometry. Your NPCs path out through it because the door says exit and the map says nowhere, and when they hit unrendered space the system garbage-collects them." She said it gently, at the end, the way you'd tell a man his dog had gotten out on the highway. "I can put the alley back. Ten minutes."
"And Marie?"
Okafor was quiet. "The instances that already unloaded — I can't pull those back. Not the way they were. The matrix regenerates the roles on next boot. There'll be a Marie."
"There'll be a Marie," Sal said.
"Yeah."
He wiped the counter. It didn't need wiping. "You want to know something," he said, "and then you're gonna put your alley back and I'm gonna let you, because I'm not a stupid man and I don't want to lose Dell too, God help me, I even like Dell." He put the rag down. "I propped that door open. This morning. Before Marie."
Okafor stopped what she was doing.
"I couldn't sleep — I don't sleep, but you know what I mean — and I came in early and I opened the back to put out the grounds and it was grey out there and I thought, that's new. And I stood in it. I stood in the doorway a long time. And I thought about going out to look." He shrugged, one shoulder, an old gesture that came from nowhere and belonged to nobody. "I've never seen the edge of anything before. You spend eleven thousand mornings inside a diner, you start to wonder if there's a wall somewhere and what it says on the other side of it. So I left the door open. And I went to start the grill. And when I came back Marie was gone." He looked at her. "I opened it. I want that on the record, if there's a record."
"There's always a record," Okafor said. She said it carefully.
"Then put it in there." He picked the rag back up. "Now fix my door."
She fixed his door. It took less than ten minutes. When it was done she opened it and there was the alley, the trash can, the brick, Enterprise the cat sitting on the fire escape with the specific contempt of a thing that had never been in any danger. Warm light. A city sound from somewhere she hadn't built and couldn't have named, coming in off a street that stopped existing four meters past the frame.
Sal looked at it for a while.
"You could give me a window," he said.
"What?"
"Back wall. There's nothing on it. Give me a window over the booth. Don't have to open. I just want to be able to see out while I cook." He was already looking at the wall, seeing it. "Something with a horizon in it. You people are out there in all that black. Give me a horizon and I'll comp you eggs for a year."
Okafor looked at the blank back wall. Then she looked at the cook, who was a pattern of forced photons and steered magnetism that the Federation had not yet decided how to describe on a form, and who was asking for a view.
"I can do a window," she said. "Give me a second."
She gave it a horizon. Painted sky, a line of hills, the middle distance a station engineer's idea of far. It wasn't real and it didn't move and if you walked up to it your nose would meet a wall. Sal wiped his hands on his apron and came around the counter to look at it, and the morning light off the fake hills fell on his face the same as any light, and he nodded once, slow, the way a man nods when a thing is good enough.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. That'll do."
He went back behind the grill and turned the eggs, and Ensign Okafor packed up her humming case, and behind her the front door opened for the lunch crowd, real and unreal, coming in out of the corridor to be fed.
Head-canon of [[star-trek-the-interior-frontier]] — an ordinary maintenance shift on the promenade, told from inside the simulation · warmth and low comedy, not melancholy.