Laconian Crossroads: Empty Rooms

Avery Johnson Academy was often an inconsistent mix between loud and quiet periods of noise. Gunfire always rattled off from the shooting galleries, live fire range, and wargame theaters. However, walk a short distance and the bursts became small firecrackers against tall security walls and surrounding forest.
It was a nostalgic location. Sometimes Andra wondered if this planet might very well be Argus V and her old Camp Ambrose. She knew better of course, from the length of day to the local species humanity introduced to the secret colony. Still, Andra couldn’t help but wonder if she walked a few miles into the deep woods outside the Spartan training school, would she come across deeper thickets and break out into a different forested world almost a decade prior?
Would she see herself not in power armor but in a tee shirt, shorts, a shorter haircut, and five years old again? All her friends waving to her from the large security gate of Camp Ambrose? Would she see the abandoned frigate crashed into the cove below the training camp where she celebrated her graduation night?
Andra shook her head from the dreams, the memories. Her eyes drifted away from the tops of sharp conifers and put her eyes forward to the auto-sliding doors to her Spartan-III quarters at the outer edge of the Avery Johnson Academy. This part was less nostalgic. She passed open rooms with small assortments of beds, desks, and tables – spaces dedicated for smaller groups than the tight, ten-person cubicles her teammates slept in atop hammocks and owned little else.
Here the rooms belonged to individuals and smaller groups. Andra even had had her own room. It wasn’t an alien concept, but it was different from living with a Spartan team fulltime and to have a family to count on. She didn’t really have a team anymore. Her Team Boson scattered to the interstellar winds. Roxanne and Daniele were out there chasing their own definitions of freedom. Zachariah was probably out in deep space doing some black ops. Shizuko was sleeping again somewhere under her cryo ice. Or maybe they were all dead to the Created.
It was hard to know in this galactic order where most of human space was stuck in an electronics dark age, unable to communicate. It was a scary thought. Behind the colony markers on outdated interstellar maps, a Banished fleet or a post-Created Guardian could lie in wait. Andra spent a year out in that chaos. She didn’t want to go back, but eventually she would have to. Someone had to stitch the UNSC and Earth government back together. There weren’t many people left with the ability to do it, so it sometimes fell on the shoulders of unprepared child-soldiers like her. The UNSC remnants were desperate, Andra wasn’t foolish enough to miss that, but her fear wasn’t unfounded either.
Many of the beds in the nearby quarters were without pillows and sheets. Empty bunks left for those who might find their way here. Or a reminder, of those who would never make it home.
Andra passed her bedroom and passed the rest, moving to the storage rooms on the far side of the living quarters. She could hear soft humming as she approached, a reminiscent tune from her long-dead childhood and a long-dead mother. The auto-sliding door parted, and Andra entered a well-shaded space rinsed in thin beams of deflected sunlight across the dusty floor. Tables, chairs, and décor furniture stacked and pushed into the room’s far side.
A light projector spun in slow, wild luminosity overhead as mixed water vapor escaped from its EM projection tank next to the clutter. Within the leaky condensation, refracted light formed a rippling yellow sphere speckled with cerulean dots.
Someone was home, as always. A disembodied voice that sounded almost like Andra greeted the Spartan. “If you’re looking for Merlin, he went for a walk outside the wire.”
Andra sniffed at the dismissive remark. She didn’t come here looking for her best friend, quite the opposite in fact. But it felt wrong that this was how her counterpart addressed her.
“I didn’t come down here to speak to Merlin,” Andra responded to the empty room. She noted the flickering from the hologram sphere seem to slow and realign into a more solid form as the electromagnetic containment field resealed the escaping gas.
“Then why did you come?” The room’s voice asked in an expectant tone. If Andra could see Althea’s form, she imagined the artificial intelligence would cross her hologram arms. If it were Andra, that was something she would do.
“I wanted to talk. About us.”
The room fell silent, the hologram sphere stopped rotating in the empty air. Althea didn’t generate her form into the space. The AI said nothing. The feeling of awkward expectation projecting onto Andra didn’t go away.
Andra continued, “I wanted to see how you were doing?”
Althea’s voice dropped into an exasperated grunt. “I’m here. Always am.”
The Spartan nodded. “I know…”
“So, what is it about us you want to discuss? You don’t exactly come down here to check up on me.”
Andra couldn’t remember the last time she sat down and spoke to Althea. She would rather forget such sore reminders in all honesty. It didn’t matter what a disconnect meant in her relationship with the AI. She just wanted to forget, but that wasn’t practical or reasonable.
Althea was here in this room. She waited for Andra to speak with the very same hostility Andra afforded her over the last few years. Two could play at this game, and so they did. The tides had shift and now Andra was the one met with the cold shoulder.
Andra shivered in discomfort but forced her will to speak. Except her voice fell silent as she found no words to say. Her mind drew a blank as her lips pressed together into a frown.
“You said you had something to say,” Althea reminded with remarkably familiar annoyance.
“I… I don’t know where to start.”
The projector flickered from the corner of the room,