Communications Officer Pamela Beesly sat crying in her chair in the primary command module, and she didn’t know why.

Oh, she knew a lot of potential reasons why; it was just that there were so many that she could hardly choose one contributing factor.

She wept because Lieutenant Halpert—Jim—had just confessed his love for her.

She wept because, while she hadn’t told him she loved him too, she hadn’t actually told him she didn’t—and whether telling him “I can’t” made her a complete failure of a communications officer, because it didn’t actually address the real issue, or a massive success because it managed to skirt that issue while sounding completely definitive, she wasn’t sure—and she felt an incredible wave of guilt wash over her when she thought of her fiancé deep in the freeze of the Warehouse.

She wept because Jim had looked so…so crumpled, like a landing strut after a hard impact on an asteroid or the silver wrapping around their emergency rations on that one drill where they’d had to improvise shelter during the VR training, and she and Jim had convinced Dwight—Lieutenant Schrute—that crumpling that particular plastic made it structurally sound.

Then she wept because thinking about pranking Dwight with Jim was exactly what she couldn’t afford to do right now.

And she wept because she was alone, in space. Oh, to be sure, there were a dozen active staff and the innumerable thousands in the Warehouse, but without Jim she felt as alone as if she’d been stranded all by herself in an escape pod (another VR simulation they’d had to endure, and by far her least favorite). She was far from everyone and anything she loved. Yes, Roy was in the deep freeze, but all that meant was his brain was ticking along at about a neuron-fire a minute—and it was awful of her to wonder how much faster it really went when it was warm, wasn’t it?—and Jim was…well, actually she didn’t know where Jim had gone after his confession and her mealy-mouthed rejection. But it wasn’t here.

She was still a good ship’s officer, of course. She wept over the vacuum attachment by her desk, designed to clear the area in the event of an emergency that produced “floaters” (items floating around in a zero- or low-G environment that interfered with emergency work) so she could operate her communications equipment, but equally up for recycling the water of her sadness. She briefly considered the irony of recycling tears—would they make others sad if they drank the water she had wept out?—but stopped when she found herself wondering what Jim would make of the thought. He’d probably tell her to paint the image in the VR suite, titling it something like “Infectious Emotions,” and to send him the image file once she did.

He was sweet like that.

And she’d just broken his heart.

To be fair to herself, she thought, she hadn’t known he was going to say anything. She’d been sure, in fact, that he wouldn’t—that if he’d been going to say something it would have been before they took off, because he was generally considerate of things like that—and so she’d rested assured that she had until their arrival at their destination to figure out how she felt about him. Because it wasn’t like Roy was going to be along on the cruise, so she didn’t really need to disentangle her feelings about him from her feelings about Jim until they were both awake at the same time.

And she’d been so sure of that, she realized, so confident that she had all the time in the world to think things through, that she hadn’t actually let herself think two extremely important thoughts until this very moment.

One was that she was, actually, genuinely interested in Jim Halpert. She’d been avoiding the reality of that so long that apparently the idea that she could just “decide between” him and Roy had burrowed itself into her consciousness without her realizing it. When had she started thinking of the end of this journey as a decision point? And when would she have realized that she was thinking that way if Jim hadn’t just given her the push that had sent her, reeling, to the command module?

The other was that she had been fooling herself: she didn’t have until the end of the voyage, because Roy was going to be woken up in just a few days. And while she’d had all the time in the world to discount his drunken promise to marry her when he was next awake, he hadn’t. He’d been in cold storage down in the Warehouse. To him, he’d made that promise yesterday, or the day before.

And she wasn’t entirely sure if she wanted him to do it.

Oh, she’d enjoyed planning the wedding, sure enough. Having something to focus on beyond the absurdity of “checking for messages” when they were at speeds at which light itself struggled to keep up with their motion had been a godsend. Her job was only real when they were within, say, half a day of their departure or destination, and it had been a joy to have something to do during the day at her desk. But when she’d been planning, had she really been thinking about having the wedding this week? Having Roy awake, saying her vows to him, having a wedding night, then sending him back into the Warehouse a married man?

She knew the answer was no. She’d been thinking of the wedding planning as something to distract her on the voyage, something with an eventual payout, sure, but not something that was urgent, present, now.

But Jim, she realized, had been.

He must have been counting down the days until now, when he couldn’t help but say something.

But what was she going to do? She did love Roy, for all that Jim made her days bearable. She was going to marry Roy. She couldn’t be with Jim, and she’d told him as much. And yet…how could she go on without Jim, either?

This was an emergency, she decided. And since it was an emergency, it called for three things.

One was a tablet of chocolate, which she’d stashed underneath a non-functional button on her desk back during pre-flight checks. Non-extruded, non-vat-based, natural chocolate was rare and valuable, but if there was ever a time that called for it, it was now.

Two was relaxation. As communications officer, she was the junior officer in the command module and as such she had the worst, least comfortable chair (why this should be true when the ship was built from scratch for this mission, she couldn’t quite make out, but it was true, nonetheless). She was going to sit in someone else’s seat, dammit, just this once, because she needed it.

Why she chose the crash couch by the entry hatch, Jim’s duty station when he wasn’t in position in the secondary module, she refused to speculate.

Three was the message her mother had sent her right before takeoff, with the ominous label “Listen to ONLY in case of emergency.” She would have worried it was something somber—a will, perhaps, or some dire family secret—if underneath that there hadn’t been the reassuring message “Don’t Panic! Happy Thoughts Only!” She had no idea what the message might be, but she trusted her mom, and while this might not be the worst emergency on this voyage, it was probably the only one where she’d have the leisure to listen to whatever her mom had recorded. That was justification enough.

She popped the chocolate and reclined into the couch (it was naturally molded to Jim’s body shape, which she had expected to find slightly awkward, but it seemed to envelop her like a warm embrace). Snuggling into the soft material and strapping herself in by instinct, she triggered the beginning of her mom’s message as she chewed.

“Hi honey!” It was all she could do not to answer back. But her mom was back on Earth, not on the DM Scranton. “I love you.” And I love you, mom, she thought. I wish you were just three hours away like you used to be on Earth, instead of three warp jumps. “And now, young lady, it’s time for your pep talk.”

How like her mom to know that if she were in a real emergency, the thing she’d need most would be a pep talk. Pam had never really struggled as a child except with confidence, but she struggled with that on a daily basis. She wouldn’t have become an officer on a colony ship without stellar test scores and aptitude markers—for all that Roy had grumbled that “the tests are biased” when he was relegated to cargo, she was proud of her own results—but she didn’t always act like it. In fact, the first time she’d really come out of her shell had been when she’d insisted on taking the crew position they’d offered her, even when Roy had suggested that “you’ll miss me too much” and “we should just sleep our way there together.” So in any emergency—even this one—she needed a confidence boost more than anything. She breathed a silent thanks to her mother and settled in to hear the talk.

Her mother’s voice went over the usual elements of a mother-daughter pep talk from her youth: going over all the things she’d overcome to get where she was today, reminding her that she loved her and believed in her, reinforcing that she wouldn’t be where she was now if she wasn’t capable (“even if Captain Scott’s position makes it seem like that can’t be true, I’m sure it’s true of you at least”), emphasizing that they’d gone through all their testing and training for precisely whatever situation this was (not exactly, Mom, Pam thought. They didn’t put heartbreak in the VR sessions). But it was the end of her mother’s message that really made her sit up and take notice.

“And Pam? Remember that you’re not alone. No, I don’t mean me—I wish I could be with you, honey, I really do, but these old bones don’t relocate as easily as they used to—but I do have a deputy on that ship with you.” As her mother paused, Pam smiled weepily, thinking about all the time her mother had spent with Roy as Pam and Roy grew up together, started dating, planned their emigration. She’d been like a second mother to Roy, and he’d been the son she’d never had but always wanted (“a matched set,” she’d always told Pam). They’d spent even more time together as Pam had been drawn away into officer training, with her mother sometimes laughing to Pam that it almost felt like Roy was her child and Pam the one marrying into the family, for all he was over at her house so often. This was the reminder she needed that she and Roy were meant to be—that he was a part of her, a part of her family, her mother’s designated representative from afar.

That’s why it was such a surprise to hear what her mother actually had to say. “Remember that you can always count on Lieutenant Halpert for whatever you need.”

The bottom dropped out of her stomach—unusual, as the ship had continued on its merry way without a hitch, and she was strapped into the crash couch anyway—and she stared at the console as it continued to play her mother’s message. In her surprise she’d missed a few seconds, so she rewound and listened to it again with startled ears.

“I can’t remember the last time you messaged me about training without some anecdote about Jim—usually some prank you played on that other lieutenant, Schute or Toot or whatever his name is. When I visited your training I had a chance to see you two working together, and I want you to remember this: a prank is just a plan with a funny purpose. That man knows how to make a plan, and you two know how to work together to make it happen. If you have any trouble—and since you’ve opened this message I’m assuming you either have, or you’ve reached your destination, in which case  I want to be the first to say congratulations! Call your mother!—you’re going to need all that practice to get you out of whatever trouble it is. Oh, I daresay you thought you were goofing off from training when you pulled those pranks, but I don’t think even Captain Scott would have let you keep doing them if they didn’t serve a higher purpose. You can count on Lieutenant Halpert. I do; I’m counting on him to keep you safe. And above all else remember I love you, and I’m proud of you.”

Pam sat back in the crash couch, suddenly extremely aware of exactly whose couch it was, and goggled. “You can count on Lieutenant Halpert?” What the hell, Mom? Where was the reassuring message about Roy that she’d been listening for?

What was she supposed to do now?