Brenda had created a simulacrum to play with Enrikk and placed him nearby in a room with passageways too high for him to possibly escape. She directed her attention, through the Halo, to what the toy saw, staying alert for any danger or need. Currently, the pudgy little 8-month-old was laughing and trying to catch the giant frog's arms while it stroked Enrikk's strawberry blond hair.
Brenda and Richard were working on what appeared to be a ramp or balcony along an edge of the vast emptiness in the center of the sphere. At the moment, they had determined it to be a loading ramp. The structure had no controls but featured an interface similar to Janice, functioning through some kind of telepathy.
"If we assume programmable matter, why have a permanent ramp at all?" Brenda asked from across the room. Richard, exhausted from staying awake all night due to Enrikk's incessant crying, wished once again that BioNano could prevent tiredness. But fatigue was not a condition that deviated from DNA.
"Perhaps it was already in that shape when they left, or died, or whatever," he replied, not really listening. He struggled to concentrate on the tiny holes in the wall while fighting off his weariness. He wanted to ask Brenda to be quiet and let him focus, but he knew that would trigger her. She did not like being overlooked assuming it had to do with her gender - childhood issues. So he did his best to tune her out, convinced he was on the right track. These holes reminded him of small headphone jacks from his early childhood. Maybe they served as interfaces for controlling machinery, or perhaps the aliens themselves were technological. So many questions filled his mind. It was easy to make unrealized assumptions.
Hours passed, with Brenda keeping an eye on their son while experimenting with the ramp. She grew increasingly irritated by Richard's frequent "uh huhs." Exhausted and reaching his breaking point from having his thoughts constantly interrupted by information related to a project other than his own, Richard longed for solitude. But he had sealed off that possibility by having another child.
"No wheels, no gliding mechanism, just about the only straight lines in Whatchamacallit," Richard's chosen name for the structure. "For now, I'm going to assume it involves gravity manipulation and see where that leads me Richie," Brenda declared.
She was the only one that ever sometimes called him Richie and it always jangled his nerves a little, this time intruding enough to smash Richard's train of thought.
"For the love of all that is holy, will you please shut up?! I might figure this out if I could have one uninterrupted thought!" he yelled, becoming aware of his raised voice.
Although Richard was 20cm taller and around 40kg heavier than Brenda, she was wearing the Halo, its gently glowing yellow almost blending with her hair. The Halo granted her control over the programmable matter they had fabricated and, more importantly, localized gravity fields. This required contact with the ship and machinery they had brought with them, but with her clever mind, it gave her a significant advantage.
Enraged, almost weightless thanks to a command to the Halo, Brenda swiftly crossed the distance between them, wielding a large spanner, and increased the gravity on it to 5g. She viciously smashed it down on Richard's right shoulder, causing a satisfyingly loud wet cracking noise. Richard let out a horrifying shriek. Unable to maintain her grip on the vibrating wrench, it fell to the floor with a solid thump, clearly audible over Richard's wailing.
More than anyone else, Brenda knew the extent of what her BioNano could do. She could completely decapitate Richard, and assuming contact with matter, his head would regrow a body within a year, good as new. However, if floating detached from everything, the brain would slowly consume it's remaining structure in a futile attempt to preserve consciousness, eventually resulting in failure. Though righteously angry, Brenda would never have employed such force if they were still mortal.
Richard collapsed on the ground, clutching his injured arm with his other hand. He curled up in a fetal position in preperation for continuing blows. Unlike those equipped with Janice technology, his pain was not regulated unless instructed from an external source. And the only one capable of providing that aid didn't appear to be in a helpful mood. Wracked with agony, Richard desperately wished he had paid attention to their earlier discussion.
"I'm sorry, love. Please, the pain...," Richard curled up tighter.
"Have I finally managed to capture your attention?" she spat, her voice feral. Her face bent down mere centimeters from his.
Lying prostrate on the jagged, unwelcoming ground, Richard felt logic surrender to raw, primal instinct. Spotting the spanner within reach of his uninjured arm, he lunged for it. A symphony of pain erupted from his wounded shoulder as he relinquished his grasp, reaching out and snatching the instrument.
His first attempt to lift the spanner was met with resistance. Its unexpected heaviness shocked his already frazzled senses. Digging deep, muscling through the pain, he recalibrated his strength and hoisted the spanner through the stifling air. He aimed for the glowing Halo that encircled Brenda's head, her face brought into proximity as she bent down to confront him visage to visage.
He aimed for the glowing Halo that encircled Brenda's head, hoping to deprive her of its aid in controlling their surroundings. But his swing held no grace, no tactical precision – it was sheer desperation, fueled by survival. Instead of delivering a glancing blow knocking it off, the spanner crashed head-on into the Halo. Then, with horrifying finality, her skull buckled under the force, folding onto itself. She crumpled on top of him in a lifeless heap.
Their shared sanctuary transformed into a dim, brutal tableau, awash in the stark red evidence of their struggle. Their blood bathed the room, an eerily silent witness to the catastrophic end of their primal conflict.
A dual realization hit Richard like a double-edged sword: Brenda would lie unconscious for days, and Enrikk was now without supervision. Powerless to aid Brenda in her current state, Richard mustered what little strength he had left to gently push her lifeless form off him. He ignored the torment in his shoulder and mind. Leaning heavily against the cruelly uneven walls of the hallway, he dragged himself towards his unattended son.
With every laborious step, the reality set in: his injured arm would mend itself in a couple of days, but Brenda's injuries, especially her fractured skull, would demand significantly more time.
A few days, after he had regained some semblance of health, he managed to carry Brenda to their common living space.
An urgent need gnawed at Richard: the fabrication of another Halo. The absence of his ability to effortlessly float over and through the haphazardly dispersed 'doorways' presented an immense obstacle, rapidly draining his energy and pace. This sluggishness meant leaving Enrikk under the solitary supervision of the animated frog for extended periods of risk-ridden time.
The mere thought of leaving Enrikk alone long enough for him to reach the ship, fabricate a Halo and return froze his blood - an utterly unnerving prospect. Conversely, attempting to navigate to the ship while cradling Enrikk risked leaving Brenda alone upon her inevitable reawakening.
Richard was caught in a relentless grip of a dilemma, ensnared in a cruel twist of fate that held him captive in an intricate web of formidable decisions.
In addition to his growing host of problems, without the Halo, Richard was powerless against the incessant antics of the enormously proportioned, chattering frog. This amphibian, conceptualized and created by Brenda using the ship’s programmable matter, was persistently committed to its programmed mission: to entertain Enrikk. Its determination often led to Richard being abruptly jolted from those infrequent moments of tranquil sleep, either by the frog's direct, boisterous bouncing onto him or the resulting wake-up calls for Enrikk.
Every effort to exclude it from the room was in vain. Regardless of being evicted or bound, the adaptable toy had an uncanny knack for overcoming adversity, morphing around restrictions and returning to its post by Enrikk's side. Brenda's programming, thorough but designed short-term, hadn't accounted for this lengthy manifestation, nor the frog's ability to differentiate Richard from any other inanimate object in the room.
As a result, in the frog's perspective, Richard was just another fixture in the room. The elusive comfort of sleep, already a precious rarity in this tumultuous setting, was becoming an even loftier, nearly impossible pursuit.
And with no Janice Cells - until they got back to the colonies - Rik's basic hygiene was not automatically taken care of. Richard was on both poop and cleaning detail. Luckily both the water fabricator and the waste recycler were crafted with manual controls.