Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  #

  Afterward, Ennesta gets her limbs tangled on the ladder up to the bridge, and I can’t help but chuckle when one of them slips off and bonks me lightly in the head. I use a spare two tentacles to guide her paw back to the ladder, and she pushes off my head up into the bridge with a little more force than is strictly necessary—a gentle poke.

  “Well, if it isn’t the stowaway,” Jorusz says, scales throbbing between red and purple. “What do you want?”

  “Ennesta’s a shapeshifter,” I blurt out. “She isn’t sure what her species is supposed to look like. Tell them, Ennesta.”

  The InstaComm pings, and Jorusz mutters at the screen.

  “Ennesta?”

  She’s left my side, running almost all the way up to Jorusz before seeming to remember she’s afraid of him. Her eyes are wide and full of fear.

  The InstaComm ejects a fresh message sphere, and Jorusz casually tosses it into a bag of them. Clearly the Tro’o are being their usual high-maintenance selves.

  Ennesta’s eyes are glued to the bag of message spheres. Or maybe it’s the bag of flattened, used spheres she’s eyeing, in stunned horror. Jorusz touch-types something into the InstaComm, head swiveled to look away from the screen toward us.

  “Stop,” Ennesta says. “Please!”

  “Stop what?” KrunZo asks. He hits the blue button and the machine pings cheerily.

  And Ennesta looks at him with such hurt and rage that I recoil from her.

  The flattened message sphere pops out of the InstaComm console. Jorusz makes to toss it into the bag with the rest of them, but Ennesta holds out one trembling paw. Jorusz looks to KrunZo, who grunts a confused assent.

  Ennesta takes the oblong disc in one paw, then holds it in both before her, reverently, as though it’s not just a bit of trash destined for the matter reclamator but something very precious. She holds it up to her face, looking closely, then sniffing, and after a moment during which none of us breathe, she takes a deep breath and releases it as a keening, piercing howl.

  For a long while none of us move, shocked into inaction by Ennesta’s uncharacteristic, unrelenting loudness. KrunZo, as befits a captain, is the first to recover. “What in Gravity’s name are you doing?” he demands.

  “She’s mourning, you idiot,” Quonka says mildly, climbing up into the cockpit. She kneels beside Ennesta, placing one hand on the place where Ennesta’s back bends unnaturally upright. “There there, sweetie,” she says. “You want to tell us why the message sphere makes you so sad?”

  Ennesta quiets, nodding. “It’s dead,” she says. “Dead again and again and again.”

  #

  The machine births me, as usual. The ping, as usual, is the first thing I remember. And then the words of a message, as they’re squeezed from me. They slip away, leaving little behind. In larval stage, my senses are not sharp. I feel movement, textures against my exterior. I sense light, though I have no eyes.

  Then a flash of cold, and nothing.

  I wake back in the machine, again. Words are stabbed into me, a destination, the sharp-sweet-rotten smell, and then the crush, the pain. I expect the momentary nothing pause and then the ping of a new life. But the crushing goes only partway. I hear the ping, but it’s a different one than before, and my senses are alive like never before, alive with pain.

  I am grabbed. I am in a hand, and the voice attached to the hand is weary and grumbling, and I tumble into a bag with other refuse. For I realize that’s what I am. They do not know I am alive. I am lucky garbage.

  For a kilosecond or two I can’t move. I am too young, too wounded. But we grow fast. I consume the other refuse and by the time they throw us all into space I am a fat sphere again, lucky garbage of lazy ship.

  In larval stage, I have no need for air. I float, I tumble like asteroid.

  I am lucky a third time, because you shoot through my space. I have just enough strength to end larval stage and choose a form and hold onto your ship. And here I am.

  We stare at her, waiting for the punchline. Ennesta lifts the flattened sphere of the most recent message sent in one paw.

  “This is what I should have been. The machine should have killed me; sent my soul to the other end to be birthed with the message.”

  After a moment of silence, Jorusz is the one to break it. “You’re trying to tell us you’re a damn message sphere?”

  Ennesta shakes her head. “No. I’m trying to tell you that the message spheres are the same as me.”

  Jorusz’s scales pulse brighter and brighter orange. “That’s impossible! It’s a damn machine. It doesn’t birth any larvae.”

  “How do you know?” Quonka asks, still kneeling next to Ennesta.

  In response, Jorusz only flashes a ripple of colors at her.

  “It’s a fair question,” I say, the concrete puzzle of a mechanical question snapping my mind back into focus. “I’ve worked on just about every kind of machine there is, but never on an InstaComm. No one has. It’s common knowledge that you just can’t even think of opening one of those things up, but did you read the warning on the unit closely? Punishable by memory wipe. So for all we know it does birth larvae.”

  “That would explain a few things,” Quonka says. “I’ve always wondered how the messages are transmitted so fast, faster than anything else in the known universe. If they do run on reincarnation...”

  KrunZo, still as a mountain in his captain’s chair, does his best to steeple his stubby arms. “Well, sure. Reincarnation is instant. But it’s also random.”

  Ennesta looks alarmed. “It is?”

  “Isn’t it?” I ask.

  “It isn’t for me. For my people. The machine controls it, and now that I am free from the machine I could control it.”

  “Gronkshit,” Jorusz grumbles. “There is no such thing as a species that can control its reincarnation. We’d’ve heard about it!”

  “That’s what you’ve been looking for, isn’t it?” Quonka asks, ignoring Jorusz even though he’s strobing between black and orange.

  Ennesta blushes her furry face somehow—she must be changing the color of her fur. “I was born into the machine. I don’t remember where home is.”

  “And you want to find it so you can die and be reborn there?” Quonka asks.

  Ennesta nods.

  And my third heart sinks like a stone. Of course. She’s just waiting for the right current to swim away from me. Stupid of me to have thought otherwise, for even a nanosecond. “Now hold on,” I begin, but—

  “This is nonsense!” Jorusz interjects. “First of all, you’re all listening to a wild yarn from a stowaway who’s probably an ISTO spy. And second, if it is true, then we’re probably all going to get disappeared for violating InstaComm’s terms. I can’t believe what a ship of fools I’m on.”

  “I can prove it,” Ennesta says quietly, and it only takes following her gaze to the bag of fresh message spheres to figure out how. According to InstaComm, they must be put into stasis within four kiloseconds or one standard Galactic Hour. But what if they weren’t?

  “Let them grow up,” she says.

  “Astrill,” KrunZo asks, “what’s the penalty for that?”

  #

  It takes about another few days—as I reckon them—to reach the Tro’o rendezvous, a jungle moon of the system’s third planet. Needless to say, we send no more InstaComm messages. Luckily, we’re close enough by now that holos really will do just as well, even for the anxious Tro’o.

  The gravity lovers—including KrunZo, who takes any opportunity he can to ambulate on flat land—shuttle the cargo down, while Ennesta and I tend to the brood of message spheres whose number increases with every transmission from the Tro’o. We’ve been feeding them table scraps and anything else otherwise headed for the matter reclamator that Ennesta deems suitable. It’s unnerving how they absorb the food into themselves. The spheres are getting big; the first ones we freed from stasis are almost half the size of Ennesta, who, now that I think of it, als
o seems to be growing. She’s about my size now, and I wonder if she’ll end up towering over me the way the other crew members do. I’m sure even she has no idea how big she’ll get.

  Over the holo from down on the moon, the Tro’o are stomping around on their feathery hind legs, roaring at KrunZo and Jorusz and Quonka and waving their clawed hands. While most of the Tro’o take pride in their reasoning, the sect we most often deal with behaves like the monsters they resemble. It’s only a matter of time before they demand not just lab-grown meat but murdered meat, and then live animals to hunt. I’d bet any quantity of the finest Kranellian snapps on it.

  I mute the holo display. How am I supposed to know if negotiations are about to turn south, when the Tro’o bellow like that to say hello? I enlarge a scanner screen tracking nearby ships. None of them squawk ISTO, but then they wouldn’t, would they? I scroll through the ships’ actual images one at a time.

  In the unused cabin we’ve turned into a message sphere nursery, holographic dinosaurs stomp and spaceships fly. And a non-holographic sphere wobbles, cracking open like an egg with no shell, stretching and unfolding tentatively. I’m breathless to see what Ennesta’s species looks like, even more to see her finally see it too, but no. Limbs emerge (four of them); a head stretches into shape. A tail extrudes from what is now the creature’s posterior, and proportions adjust to account for it. After a long moment the newly born... whatever Ennesta’s species is called... claws zir way out of the bunk’s netting and opens zir toothy mouth to roar. Congratulations, it’s a Tro’o! Clearly this former sphere’s choice of form was influenced by the holo.

  We’ve done our best to research Ennesta’s species, with no luck. There is no record in the libraries of either a shape-shifting species or one that can control its reincarnation—only legends of feats performed by acolytes of the Collective, none with provable results. My theory is that a species with that kind of control might never choose to leave their home system; perhaps none have ever been reborn as something else, somewhere else.

  It sounds like paradise.

  I’ve had more lives than anyone else on this crew, having bounced all over the universe since the days of the fifth Galactic Empire. I’ve ended up in regions so remote that there was no interstellar trade, even been planet-bound a couple of times. I’ve been mammalian, reptilian, avian, heptopod, and almost every other kind of thing there is, with no connecting thread that I can discern. Yeah, it’s exciting. Variety is the spice of lives, right?

  It’s also lonely. I’ve never been reunited with any past loves. Or past friends. Or acquaintances. A person starts to feel like love is pointless at best, counterproductive even.

  We’ve also been trying to research InstaComm. How was the miraculous technology developed? How does it work? All we’ve found are more legends and conspiracy theories. Was the Lost Generationship of the Pro’oco steered into a star because they knew too much? According to the lead-hat wearers, yes.

  All official inquiries lead to the same result—a form allowing one to place a request to purchase a system or to request technical support. Don’t call us; we’ll call you.

  #

  By the time the shuttle is back on board, three more of the spheres have hatched. One looks like a kind of bat-winged bird, one looks like a miniature Quonka, and the third can’t seem to make up its mind, shifting between two legs and four and six, experimenting with skin and scales and fur.

  Peering into the net they’re incubating in, Ennesta’s arms twined with my tentacles, I can’t help but think of my own offspring, swimming the various seas of the Trango System. Each one was hatched from a clutch like this; each was the lone survivor of a brutal post-birth scrum. Ennesta assures me that these babies won’t start murdering and devouring each other, but I’m not sure how she knows that.

  Looking at them, each certainly possessed of a soul, I wonder for the first time about my offspring who didn’t make it through the melee. Roptralian wisdom holds that they have no souls, that only the survivor is imbued with one. But what if we’re wrong? What if each of them lived a brief, violent life? Born to die, never even named, mourned by none.

  All of Ennesta’s lives have been like that.

  I stretch my tentacles to pull her closer to me, and she purrs. She’s nothing like Zaraell, but we feel like new parents.

  None of the “children” the memory spheres have become know what their species should look like or where the home planet is. Yet they have memories—or at least fragments of memories—dating back almost a terasecond. Tens of thousands of Roptralian years. Further back than the first life I can remember. Messages mundane and critical have passed through them to all parts of the galaxy—for those who can afford InstaComm’s rates.

  Zaraell is not one of those. Zir messages come as holos, bound by the universe’s speed limits. One is here now, and the computer asks me if I want to view it now. Why not? The meat deal is done and the crew is back on board. The dinosaurs have stopped stomping and turned to their cargo, presumably. At any rate, they’re no longer my concern.

  Zaraell’s face appears much larger than life, and Ennesta momentarily starts, then goes back to chatting with the newly hatched message spheres and hovering over the younger ones, waiting.

  Zaraell sits in a peach-colored coral house I’ve never seen before, that opens behind zir to a stunning vista of clear water and lovingly sculptured kelp gardens and the rolling hills of Roptrango-A’s trendiest city. It’s rendered in 2D, of course, but I still feel the punch I know Zaraell intended—why else spend the extra to render the background at all?

  But despite the perfection of zir setting, the lines around zir beak betray worry. “I can’t imagine why you haven’t responded to my last message,” ze begins, and I quake thinking about the distance that separates us. I did respond, though there wasn’t much I could say about it, but we are just so far away that Zaraell won’t get that holo for another dozen lunar tides—most of zir solar year. Ze’s probably about to get one I sent five jobs back, before I ever heard ze wanted to split up, and I can’t imagine what ze’ll make of its sunny long-distance love platitudes now.

  “I decided not to wait, as you can see. I moved. I really like my new apartment—there’s even a sundeck on the top floor that’s dry at low tide. You can see the stars. I still look at them at night and wonder which direction you’re off in.”

  Zaraell’s image sighs, bubbling out tiny, pretty spheres that I feel I could almost touch. Ennesta sidles up to me, nuzzling. Her eyes are as wide as oceans.

  “Please message me back,” Zaraell says. “I want to see your face.” And the holo flickers off.

  I slump to the cabin floor. We’ve started burning away from the Tro’o on to the next adventure, and gravity is as high on the ship as it ever is, but that’s not what’s weighing me down. A heavy lump sits on my second heart, and it’s made of the distance from here to home.

  “That was your home system?” Ennesta asks, with surprising intensity. Her six legs are all dancing like she has to pee.

  I gesture yes with the roll of a couple tentacles.

  “What is it called?”

  “Trango,” I say, and Ennesta yelps, covering her mouth with her paws. “Zaraell lives on Roptrango-A, the first planet, but they all look pretty similar.”

  Ennesta squirms, looking anguished in a way that I’m pretty sure isn’t jealousy. I don’t know what it is, and that sinks me with worry.

  “Why do you ask?”

  Still, Ennesta stalls. “Is it really that beautiful there?”

  I laugh. “Can you breathe in water? You probably can. Yeah, it’s really that beautiful. But I’m biased, you know? It’s home.”

  Ennesta is quiet.

  “I guess you wouldn’t know. Sorry. We’ll find your homeworld someday.”

  There is a look dancing in her purple eyes that I cannot place.

  “Why are you asking about Trango? You wanna go? I’ll take you there, but it’s far...”

 
; “I can get there very fast,” Ennesta says sadly. “I have to tell you something. I have horrible news.”

  #

  Research Vessel H6Alpha to Trango System defense.

  Disaster imminent! Misfired gravito-stellar beam on intercept course with Star Trango, ETA M141 K498 H122 S020. Trango System will be obliterated unless you build and deploy capture array by M133.4. Instructions for array follow.

  The message is so brief—before devolving into schematic instructions, that is—that I can barely understand it. It seems so clinical for something that will wipe out my entire solar system. I imagine a laser blast, shot into space, traveling forever at the speed of light. I imagine myself, behind it, trying to shield my family (because they are still family, Zaraell and the kids, despite everything) from something I can never get in front of, no matter how hard I try.

  How soon is M133.4? I’ve never been a natural with Universal Standard Time, so all I know is that it’s soon. Sooner than we can get there. Is it sooner than a holo can get there? Where’s that conversion chart?

  “Is there still time?” I ask, when I can think enough to form words. How long will it take to build the capture array?

  Ennesta shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’m just the message.”

  I look at her, really look, deep into her sad purple eyes. “You’re a lot more than that.”

  She shakes her head vehemently, pulling away from me even as I reach for her. “Am I? All I’ve ever been is a message. From here to there, life after life. Never a person.”

  “You’re a person now. A person who I...”

  “Who you what?” Ennesta is so still, not even breathing.

  “Who I...” The words stick in my throat. “Am very glad to have met.”

  Ennesta sits, heavily, folding limbs in ways I suspect real toyopops can’t. “I think I’m lucky garbage at best. Or maybe not-so-lucky garbage. If I’d stayed a message, your home would be safe.”