by Hugh Howey
* * *
The next morning, I find what may be a clue. It is discovered by my sensitive back: a lump in my mattress or a spring bent out of shape. This is two mornings in a row with an ache in my spines (my mother would, again, call me soft of tentacle). I tear the sheets off my mattress in search of the answer.
All the springs are in fine shape, but running a tentacle across the mattress, I feel a lump. A very hard lump with sharp corners. It turns out to be a small data drive sewn into the fabric of the mattress. This is most curious. I wouldn’t think my beloved Mil would be into sexing vids, which is all I have ever used these for. The drive is locked. I try to access it with the wall terminal, but it refuses my tentacle. Coded to Mil’s secretions, unless it belongs to someone else.
One mystery is solved, and that’s the second suicide. Even with Mil’s memories restored to some prior, stable state, she would have found the drive and accessed some reminder. She had left a note to herself before the first deed, and upon discovering it, gave a repeat performance. Maybe her superiors knew she had left some memory behind, and so they sent her to another ship. To my bunk. Where she is being sexed by Kur.
The only problem with my brilliant theory is that Kur says she’s still trying to hang herself. But that could be explained by the sexing! I chuckle to myself. I will have to tell Kur that one. I bring up my messages on the terminal to pass this joke along and to tell him about the data drive, when I see a message waiting in my inbox from him, saying that he has thwarted another attempt on her life.
Why does my heart go out to her? Why am I not disturbed? And what if she kills herself yet again and they are out of bodies for her in the vats here? They might bring her back as a man, and now it is too late and I already love her.
Listen to me. A cycle ago, I was dreaming of saving enough for a plot of land and a settlement pass, of making a permanent home on some ball of mud. Now I am worried over a woman with a career of demotions and a pile of debt.
I study the locked drive, this lone token of hers. It was sewn into the top of the mattress, almost as if designed to gouge a spine and annoy the resting. Like it was meant to be found. Maybe it wasn’t planted for her at all—but for me.
Two days to planetfall, and a radio tech’s madness consumes me. I should be worried about my own skin. A bad death means more debt I can ill afford. But it’s difficult to stop being a Liaison Officer. I am trained to dig and to study and to know a soul before we destroy them. Now I find myself curious about a soul intent on destroying herself.
* * *
It is download day, one day before planetfall. After mess, we file by rank down to the vats and hold our tentacles very still in the tight confines of the scanner. Annual copies were taken in my old line of work, but they were treated casually—few people fall over dead at their research terminals. This time, I don’t move a muscle. I try not to think any stray thoughts. I have a very good feeling that this copy will be needed.
Will I wake up with my current sense of dread intact? Will my first thought be, upon my rebirth, please don’t let me die tomorrow? What a strange life. It is only strange to me because I have studied so many races who only know final death. Their one life is all, and this causes some among them to guard it until it cannot breathe. Others flail and spend it recklessly. And what do we do? We grow bored of it.
Before I joined the fleet, I remember thinking that we were conquerors of worlds. But we are conquerors of death. How many copies of ourselves have we left behind? How many will be enough? The scanner clicks and whirs around my head, recording these disjointed musings of mine, the hollow in the pit of my soul, and what is really eating at me becomes clear:
I do not dread dying tomorrow as much as I loathe the thought of taking lives with my own tentacles. I have studied for too long, read too much poetry, perhaps. I am used to making planetfall with the last of the landing parties, the crafts full of advisors and record-keepers and relic-takers. I land once the bloated bodies of all a world’s poets have already been turned beneath the soil.
So this I dread. And what else? The repetition. The waking up to do it all over again. Death becomes no more than sleep. And even if I put a bullet to this brain, and the next, and the next, swift enough to test the staying power of the vats, there will always be another of me in Second Fleet, and finally I will tire of this as well.
The scanner records these worst of my thoughts. And then the whirring and grinding falls still. Ah, how I wish I could fall still as well. Into some meditative, or more permanent, silent state.
And with this, the mystery of Mil’s second suicide is solved. It is so obvious, I feel like slapping myself with my own tentacles. I squirm from the scanner. As the next Gunner takes my place, I badger the scanner technician to look something up for me on his terminal. He is annoyed, but I have all the charm of a Liaison Officer. All I need is a date. I need to know when Mil performed her last routine backup. I tell him it is a matter of life and death. Of life and debt. And he relents.
The date is near enough that I know that I am right, but I rush back to my bunkroom and pull up Mil’s records to be sure. And yes, her backup was soon after the missing messages but just before her first attempt. Whatever she knows, it doesn’t look bad to a technician on her scans. It is not a black fog of depression, no bright colors of mental imbalance. Just a piece of knowledge, cleverly hidden away.
I fish the locked data drive out of my pocket and study this mystery. If only I had another day or two, I would get to the bottom of this. As it is, the why of it all will have to wait until after Earth. I just hope when I die in the morning, that I’ll be able to piece these more recent epiphanies together again.
* * *
It is planetfall, and as our attack craft soars down through the atmosphere toward this green and blue and white target of ours, my thoughts drift to a heat-tech I met once. I don’t remember his name, it was so long ago. He came to the bunkroom Kur and I shared when the thermostat was out. It was so cold in our room that our piss froze and crinkled before it hit the toilet. While he was working to fix the unit, the heat-tech complained that he was always cold, which I had never thought of before. Strange to think of a person who fixes heaters never being warm. But of course. He only works where the heat is broken. He must be cold all the time.
I am thinking this on the day of planetfall, because lately I have only seen our conquests in ruin. The planets are already smoking from the orbital bombardment and the armies of Gunners by the time we Liaisons ever get mud on our boots. The power grids are out; satellites blown to bolts; fires raging. Others stay behind and build an empire; they will see the place whole. But not me. I am like the heat-tech, forever cold. I am the conqueror who never glimpses what he has won. I only see these worlds in their cultural writings from deep space, and then I see them battered and broken.
These are my thoughts as the shuttle touches down and sways on its struts. The Gunners around me loosen their harnesses as the rear hatch lowers. There is gunfire from a squad that got here first. There is the scream of something heavy plummeting through thick atmosphere. Sergeant Tul yells for us to “move, move,” and we do.
I am third off the ship, and my tentacles are moist with fear. My GAW13 kicks as I fire. Tanks rumble and drones and fighter craft swirl overhead, a maelstrom of missiles exploding, fountains of dirt erupting, my first glimpse of real-life humans taking shelter, taking aim.
I have studied them so long that they feel intimate and familiar. I know them. I launch a volley into a small squad, and one of the humans is ripped in two. Our shuttle is taking fire and screams as it pulls away, lifting up to gather more bodies as they spill from orbiting vats. The resistance is stiffer than we were promised. A grenade takes out Urj, and one of his dismembered tentacles tangles around my ankle. Sergeant Tul is yelling at us to take cover. There is a mound of metal nearby, some kind of bunker half-covered with dirt that a few Gunners huddle behind. Bullets pepper its side. I fire into the humans until my gu
n overheats and then dive into the bunker. The last thing I see overhead is the flash of a new sun, a blinding ball of light, as one of our warships and all of its vats wink out of existence.
There is much yelling. Radios bark back and forth. I check my gun and my tentacles, make sure all is in place, and then I see what I am hiding inside of, this makeshift bunker. It is familiar. It is the ruin of one of our ships, a troop shuttle, but something is not right—
Bullets ping off the hull, and I can hear the natives of Sector 1 yelling and coordinating. A Gunner from another squad has taken shelter with us. Her radio barks, and she yells at Tul, “War Two is down!”
I think of Kur. Our home. Our bunkroom. Now that ship is a hailstorm of bolts plummeting through the high clouds and scattering across this ball of mud.
Inside the busted troop shuttle where we’ve taken shelter, tall grasses are swaying, waving at me, trying to signal some warning. Rov stands by the gaping hole in the shuttle’s skin, scanning the sky, her armored bulk blotting out my view of the carnage beyond. I am going to die a cowardly, expensive death, I realize.
“War One has taken a hit!” Rov shouts.
Flashes of light stab in around her, another brightening of the sky. A moment later, there is a deep grumble that I feel in my bones, a noise like the belly growl of a hungry god.
Closer by, a bomb explodes, a sharp crack followed by the howls of my kin. I hear alien craft buzzing overhead, filling the sky with the piercing shrieks of their passing, and with the whistle of loosed munitions.
All is background noise. I am watching the tall grasses wave and wave. Their feathery blades are growing up through the destroyed hull of one of our ships. There is rust here and there, cables chewed by local varmints, all the signs of that universal destroyer: Time. The scars he leaves are everywhere I look.
I hold a tentacle in front of my visor and study it. Where are my scars? Where are the physical artifacts of wounds I remember suffering? Has it really been so long? I search for an old injury that I have been hunting for and have been unable to find for a cycle now. The last thing I remember is waking in my bunk, feeling like someone else. I remember a last glimpse of my ship, dimmed and showing no pockmark, no wear of war.
Another bomb erupts in the distance. More of my people dying. And I think of the stress I witnessed among High Command on my warship. I think of the way things have been falling apart—so many people thrown to Gunner. There is a girl who will not stop killing herself, a girl who knows something, a fragment of a report about a missing signal from another ship.
There is a helmet by my feet, half-buried in the dirt of planet Earth. Tul is yelling for us to fight, and I am trying to remember a poem I once knew. The words are not with me. All around us are the signs of an invasion that did not succeed. And I know a sudden truth with all the fierceness of a hot blast—I know this as bullets zing by my helmet and bombs rage closer and closer:
We are the second fleet.
We are the reserve.
All that’s left.
And hell has come for us at last.
A Word from Hugh Howey
“Second Suicide” was a story that wouldn’t leave me alone. I wrote the first draft over a year ago. Other projects got in the way, so that rough draft sat on my computer (and swirled around in my head) for a very long time. It all started with this idea that we believe in one of two extremes: Either we have this one life, or we will live for an eternity. While these seem like the two possibilities before us, there’s a more interesting case: What if we only got one second chance? And tragically, what if we only realized it once it was too late?
In order to inspire myself to live a full life with a positive impact on my surroundings, I’ve chosen to live as if this is the only life I’ll ever have. But what about this instead: What if I did this all before, but I screwed up everything I tried, hurt those around me, and lived a truly wasted and despicable life? I know that sounds horrible, but what if this is my second chance, a chance to do more with my life, to be a better person? Should we wait on a near-death experience to show us what a gift this is and to turn things around? Or can we just pretend?
A Word from the Editor
It has been my privilege to work with Samuel Peralta and the many talented authors who have contributed to the first three installments in the Future Chronicles series of science fiction anthologies. As a reader, I have always loved short stories—but as every reader knows, the risk when diving in to any short story collection is that sometimes the stories included are hit-or-miss. A few “gems,” a few “duds,” and you hope that the good outweighs the bad.
What we have aimed to do with the Future Chronicles is to create a place where a reader can reliably expect quality storytelling from start to finish. No duds, no afterthoughts. True, not every story will be your cup of tea—and this is inevitable in any anthology with a variety of styles and topics. But our goal is for every single story to convey quality. What we hope—and what we have been delighted to observe thus far in reading the reviews of the prior Chronicles anthologies—is that every story will be some reader’s favorite.
Although I will step aside from editing the upcoming installments in the Future Chronicles (due to other commitments), I can assure you that the series will remain in excellent hands. Samuel Peralta will continue to coordinate the contributing writers, and the talented Ellen Campbell will take over editing duties. The authors lined up for the upcoming AI Chronicles and Dragon Chronicles are top-notch, and I’m looking forward to reading what they come up with. I hope you are too.
David Gatewood
A Note to Readers
Thank you so much for reading The Alien Chronicles. If you enjoyed these stories, please consider these other anthologies edited by David Gatewood:
The Robot Chronicles
The Telepath Chronicles
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel
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