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she comes here.”
    “Right,” his handler said. “Right.”
    The conversation had left him cold. Or maybe it was the cold, the rain—the dampness. Even in the overcrowded train, in the tight, airless quarters, sandwiched between the window and an enormous, corpulent man, Coe was unable to get warm. When the train finally, mercilessly arrived at his stop, Coe stood with difficulty, squeezed past the man and elbowed his way through the standing riders, reaching the doors just as they closed. His briefcase stopped them. The doors opened, and he was expelled onto the platform. He stumbled, touched the briefcase to the ground to steady himself, and caught a glimpse of the squished faces of the other riders—their expressions fixed somewhere between satisfaction and anguish; contentment and resignation. They were Earthlings. They were grateful for their place—even if it was forever shrinking. Coe composed himself and joined the flow of humanity inching its way down the steps to the congestion waiting below.
     
    His flat was a roomy 400 square feet.
    “Lights,” he said, tiredly. The apartment was suddenly awash in white light. Coe ignored the sole cockroach as it ran up the wall in response to the light. Quantum furnished the unit as part of his promotion package. They paid for pest control as well. “Left front burner on.” The blue flame of the city gas erupted in a small ring of fire on the stove. “Medium.”
    It was a smart-apt. The entire place was cued to voice recognition.
    He loosened his tie, shrugged out of his coat. He removed a frozen meal packet from the freezer, dropped it into the boiling water. Fettuccini Alfredo with broccoli spears.
    “Coffee,” he said. “Dark roast. Cream...no sugar.”
    The rain beat harder against the window.
    “Rachmaninoff,” he said.
    The Piano Concerto No. 3 began playing softly throughout the flat, canceling out the rain.
    He ate his meal. A clap of thunder reported in the distance; the lights threatened to go out—but didn’t. He placed the dishes, the pot—his fork—into the dishwasher, gave the appliance the order to “wash.”
    It was then that his vid-phone illuminated with the message: INCOMING TRANSMISSION.
    “Identify,” he said. The vid-phone response was, “Janeiro.”
    “Accept.”
    He sat down before the screen. The familiar image of a woman with olive skin and black hair—her ancestry dated back to the Mediterranean, but she was second-generation Martian—appeared on the monitor. He knew he was looking into the past. The image had left the surface of Mars, relayed to a satellite orbiting the red planet, and then beamed across space—eight minutes before.
    “Hello, Scotty,” she said. “How are you? Please tell me about your day. What news do you have to report from your first day at the corporate office? Stop.”
    They had the ability to terraform and transform parts of Mars and the moon into livable cities but still could do nothing about the delay in interplanetary communication.
    She sat patiently, smiling pleasantly from her flat in the domed city of Terre Haute while Coe dictated the following:
    “I am well, Janeiro. Thank you for asking. It is very kind of you...but that is your nature. I had an interesting day. My superior even took me out to lunch. Thai food. Do they have any good Thai restaurants on Mars? Stop.”
    They filled the silent gap in transmissions by staring at each others image, their interstellar version of a message in a bottle. She was lovely in her straight, dark tresses that curled at the ends, and her delicately long lashes and her green eyes that sparkled across the expanse of space/time. He did not have the heart to tell her about the intrigues he had committed himself to, for fear she would think less of him. She was aware that he was working on his end to orchestrate her move to Earth, that it was a convoluted affair that involved representatives of the State Department, Global Immigration (GINS), the Martian