by Wil McCarthy
The changes. How to discuss them? Ours was the most detailed exchange of information the Unpacked have ever undertaken, and probably this is just as well; those three minutes of conversation rocked Immune society to its core, a salvation from which we may, in some sense, never truly recover. And now we get a word here and there, an enigmatic phrase lifting starward on the solar wind every now and again... Is this all the Mycosystem has to offer? Not even the Temples' short-lived probes have managed to return much useful information. Just how slow are those Unpacked minds? Slow enough, one hopes, that this apathetia will continue indefinitely, that the next revelation will wait until some of us, at least, have slipped away into the great galactic night.
I, as you're probably aware, never did go back to the shoe factory, but rolled my sleeves up, pulled together some financing, and created the Subscription News Network, which, despite its name, is supported mainly by voluntary donations. Have you sent yours in? Directorship, which turned out to be quite a different thing from the actual reporting to which I'd hoped to dedicate myself, keeps me plenty busy, and this may be why it's taken me so much time to deliver this account, this history for which I'd been contracted on that fateful Anshatron morning so many years ago. But maybe it's more than that. Maybe I knew, maybe I sensed, that the closing chapter simply hadn't come yet, that our story was not complete. Not until Wallich fell ill. A neurodegenerative disorder, pathogen unidentified. Prognosis: terminal.
“I want you to attend the ceremony,” he called me up abruptly and said. They were his first words to me in almost thirteen years, delivered in gruff barks and rumbles. In a way, it was touching—he'd turned his sense of humor off just for me, sharing his true face as he'd done so many times on the long journey home. Remember me? He seemed to be saying.
By tradition, though, you only get one witness at the ceremony, and his choice of me was significant, a final mark of approval and trust.
“My tale is told,” he'd said to me, dry-eyed and somber. “All that's left is the writing it down. You still know how to do that, right?”
I'd sworn off journeying for life, but here was one I couldn't bring myself to refuse. The sway of captains is little affected by time and space, and so it was me in the witness seat that day, watching the screens, watching fifty different views of the inside and outside of Wallich's transition pod fifty thousand kilometers below, down on the fringes of Unpacked space.
He conducted himself with admirable composure, tickle capacitor off, as he disengaged the failsafes one by one and submitted to the confirmation sequence.
“Are you here of your own free will?” the pod asked him.
A clear voice: “Yes.”
“Do you have any doubts or questions about the proceedure?”
“No.”
“Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?”
He smiled wanly, showing off a tremulous hand, the flesh of his balding head ticcing visibly. “Better than death, I think.”
“Please answer with an unambiguous yes or no. Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?”
“Yes.”
“Acknowledged,” the pod said. “Confirmation sequence complete. Verbal authorization is enabled.”
There is but one cure for moonwalker's syndrome: to grow beyond it. Wallich drew breath a few times, not apparently dreading the moment but not working to hasten it, either. Finally, he turned to one of the camera dots, looked straight out at me and tipped a crisp salute. Farewell, freund. Then he licked his lips, drawing the event out one moment longer before giving voice to his final word:
“Bloom.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Engineer/Novelist/Journalist/Entrepreneur Wil McCarthy is a former contributing editor for WIRED magazine and science columnist for the SyFy channel (previously SciFi channel), where his popular "Lab Notes" column ran from 1999 through 2009. A lifetime member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, he has been nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Seiun, AnLab, Colorado Book, Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick awards, and contributed to projects that won a Webbie, an Eppie, a Game Developers' Choice Award, and a General Excellence National Magazine Award. In addition, his imaginary world of "P2", from the novel LOST IN TRANSMISSION, was rated one of the 10 best science fiction planets of all time by Discover magazine. His short fiction has graced the pages of magazines like Analog, Asimov's, WIRED, and SF Age, and his novels include the New York Times Notable BLOOM, Amazon.com "Best of Y2K" THE COLLAPSIUM (a national bestseller) and, most recently, TO CRUSH THE MOON. He has also written for TV, appeared on The History Channel and The Science Channel, and published nonfiction in half a dozen magazines, including WIRED, Discover, GQ, Popular Mechanics, IEEE Spectrum, and the Journal of Applied Polymer Science. Previously a flight controller for Lockheed Martin Space Launch Systems and later an engineering manager for Omnitech Robotics, McCarthy is now the president and Chief Technology Officer of RavenBrick LLC in Denver, CO, a developer of smart window technologies. He lives in Colorado with his family.
Find more books by Wil McCarthy at http://ReAnimus.com/authors/wilmccarthy