Kaleidotrope, October 2025
Flight Lieutenant Hilla Quinn was once the best pilot in her division—someone who could outrun Wasps, survive near-fatal encounters, and make it home against all odds. But after dying in a mine explosion during a supply run, she’s been given a new body, a perfect clone, and sent to a rehabilitation facility on Mars to relearn everything she thought she already knew.
The problem isn’t the body—it’s identical to her old one, down to the bitten nails and the kink in her little finger. The problem is that Hilla can’t reconcile being exactly the same person who experienced her own death. She crashes repeatedly during training runs, spiral-diving past Saturn’s rings, nearly going down on Pluto, and colliding with asteroids. Each failure deepens her shame and isolation as she watches other rehabilitating pilots gradually leave the facility while she remains stuck.
Her only consistent companion is MT-89, a rescue ship with its own troubled past. Once a battle-ready evacuation vessel, MT-89 malfunctioned due to a corrupted upgrade, causing the loss of an entire battalion. Now reassigned to the Mars facility, it’s considered bad luck—much like Hilla has become to herself. The ship learns her preferences through conversations with the facility’s computers: mint tea in the evenings, cheese sandwiches with sesame bread, and maple porridge for breakfast.
As the crashes accumulate, Hilla’s despair deepens. On her sixth crash, she deliberately goes down on a moon orbiting Neptune, her birthplace, and doesn’t activate her homing beacon. She lies there, staring up at the world where she was born, feeling utterly disconnected from it. These eyes have never seen Neptune. This body has never been home.
MT-89 arrives quickly and refuses to leave until Hilla confronts the truth: she’s not making any effort because she’s terrified. The ship challenges her directly, and in the darkness, Hilla finally breaks down. She admits that she lived through her own death—nine seconds of vision before the darkness, two more seconds of hearing, then just burning nerves and knowing. She’s terrified it will happen again, that next time she might not be herself.
The ship’s patient insistence helps her understand that she is still herself. Her memories are fully restored. She still loves the same foods, the same routines. When MT-89 serves her the maple porridge she ate the morning she died, Hilla takes a risk and tastes it. Despite her fears, it’s exactly the same—the sweetness, the warmth, the taste of starting out. This small act of continuity helps her accept that death didn’t erase who she is.
Hilla finally agrees to see a counselor. The seventh crash is minor, almost routine. By the eighth crash, two years later, she’s flying recruits to Errol Base when she goes down. This time, they repair the shuttle in four hours. Watching the Fifth Fleet disarm mines above, Hilla realizes she’s finally ready to face her fear—and more importantly, that she can do this all over again.
Louise Hughes is a speculative fiction writer and time traveler from the north east of England. She enjoys wandering around the hills and dales, fictionally, literally, and preferably with a flask of tea. Her work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, and Interzone.