Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  Sunny Moraine

  Ping.

  Vita. Wake up.

  Spinning through the dark, I hear and feel CERA’s alert both at once, a sound that is a vibration like a plucked string between my sealed eyes. I shift in the padded transit cocoon. I move hands that barely feel like mine, and I feel wires pulling the jacks in my skin at the same instant as my fingers hit the tape over my eyelids. I wedge my nails under the strips and they come away like old skin. My tongue feels like a dry slug trapped between my teeth and my soft palate. But all of this is distant. I’m in high orbit over myself, and I can choose where I want to place my attention.

  I chase the plucking string to its source.

  All at once I learn a number of things, data nestled at the point where I and CERA intersect, waiting for me to retrieve it. I flip through it like a printed report; it helps to imagine these things in physical terms. This is how I was trained and in moments of partial consciousness it’s best to fall back on what you know at the most basic level. And here are the new things I know: as far as CERA can determine, re-emergence into normal space has occurred. There are a number of equipment malfunctions. Most of the sensor array appears to be offline. The primary Q-drives are offline. The differential sail is online and can be deployed if needed. Life support is online.

  I am alive. I already knew this, but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

  Chronometrics are offline.

  Shit.

  Extensive systems failure was a distinct possibility; we knew this as well, and I was told it repeatedly in the weeks leading up to the launch, as if it might make a difference. It makes no difference now in the most complete possible sense, but I punch a weak fist into the padding of the cocoon.

  CERA’s plucked string voice in the center of my head—she’s waiting on my command. She’s a smart AI but even so she operates at about the intelligence of the average Labrador. She can think. But in situations featuring high degrees of uncertainty she needs instructions.

  Do we have visual?

  She shivers an affirmative into me. I feel something approaching relief; I’m flying blind in every meaningful way but one, then. My craft can’t tell me exactly where or when I am, the composition of the space around me, the relative location of any neighboring bodies, or whether I’ve gone anywhere else at all. But I can see.

  At my command CERA engages my optical feed. But my body jerks in protest, though the cocoon swallows the movement. This isn’t right. I can feel myself blinking, lifting my hands to my eyes again—the frantic movements of the abruptly blind. Because all of my vision is blackness.

  Here’s a dream that’s also a memory: Kendra and I are in our closet of a kitchen in the slightly larger closet of the apartment that we shared for those last three years, and I’m excited about work, about the breakthrough we’ve just had, about possibilities. I’m pacing in what room there is to pace. Kendra is sitting on the counter and her legs are swinging like a child’s. She’s eating an orange. I remember—and I dream, God, over and over—that at the height of my excitement, the part about the possible applications of the technology, I braced my hands on either side of her hips and kissed her and the taste of her and that orange filled my mouth and both were a kind of sweet alchemical perfection. I remember that the lights were off and the sun was westering through the window. I remember that her hair flashed a deep gold in the corner of my vision as I slid a hand into it.

  I remember these things with a clarity that doesn’t apply to anything I said aloud to her. At the time, I thought that the things I was saying were the most important part of that moment.

  I know better now. But my mind loves to remind me.

  CERA is telling me that the visual feed is fine. I shove her back into another round of diagnostics. I have no idea if an AI at her level can feel—though after a year in training with her and a third of a second in nearly constant uplink you’d think I’d know her well enough to tell—but I could swear that she’s getting tense.

  I understand that the system could have broken down in such a way that CERA can’t see the damage even when she runs the full set of diagnostics. I know that this is possible. But knowing it is useless. We have no plan for that scenario.

  CERA, if the visual is working then why can’t I see stars?

  I don’t know, Vita, CERA pings me, and of course it is. Without any of the rest of the sensory array, how could she even begin to collect herself into an answer?

  Speculate?

  It’s a half-literal stab in the dark. I don’t even know if CERA can speculate that way. I drift in the cocoon, in warm darkness, and I listen to the silence of her thinking. I know it’s wild anachronism, but I imagine immense gears turning in blackness, grinding through numbers like meat.

  It’s possible that the craft has emerged into normal space-time far beyond the edge of any local galactic groups or clusters.

  I’m not sure. I am just as much in the dark as you.

  I have to take a breath and hold it, listening to my pulse pounding between my ears—and I’m trying to ignore that last, that part of her voice that twists away from chilly digital delivery and into something a whole hell of a lot familiar. All that time we spent together, I didn’t mean for that to happen.

  Too late now. And I have bigger problems. Because what she’s saying . . . It would be beyond miscalculation. It would be disaster. Which I planned for before I climbed into my soft cocoon world, but it’s never quite the same as being faced with the fact of it—you think you can teach yourself to expect the worst, to train your mind to bend around and against it like a reed.

  But there are some things you can’t plan for.

  How remote is the possibility?

  CERA tells me. I swallow the number down and it burns. I know: it doesn’t matter how remote the possibility is if it’s actually what’s happened. I float and I try to think. I turned off the visuals but now I cut them back in again and stare at the darkness.

  Nothing. Not even the faintest specks of light. If the rest of the sensory array was online I would have ultraviolet, infrared. But I don’t. All I have is what’s in front of me. I just need to be sure of what that is.

  CERA, I say. Give me full interface.

  I can feel it, a widening of everything. The visuals are still engaged as I dive into her, spreading myself into her channels and pathways, hunting for a sign.

  Here is another dream that’s also a memory. I have this one less frequently, but it does come. I wonder sometimes if my brain makes greater sport of the ones that hurt or the ones that feel wonderful until I wake up and the rest of my memory asserts itself. Does it hurt more to live in the parts of the past that were genuinely good? I still don’t know.

  But in this dream Kendra and I are fighting. It was a very bad week. Now we have arrived at its apex, the black spike of it, and it’s about to drive itself into both of our spines and cripple us.

  You can’t ask me to choose, I’m saying. I’m close to yelling. We are standing in a half-lit living room, the TV on mute and nothing but a colored blur. We’re both so tired and that only makes it worse. That’s bullshit, Kendra. We made a deal when we got here. You can’t ask me to choose now.

  Things change, she says. Her arms are crossed and all of her feels small and cold like a body in space: distant, receding. In this moment I begin to understand that she is already leaving me. That she has already left. Why can’t we change with them? I’m not asking for anything unreasonable.

  This is the part where I let out a cough of laughter. It’s calculated to convey just the right amount of scornful incredulity. I recall that I was proud of it at the time. I’m sorry, have you completely missed everything I’ve been doing for the last four months? Did you check out when I was explaining it? Or did you just not get it?

  She’s smaller, colder. Goodbye, Kendra. Goodbye. I’m not stupid, she says. In this memory—and how close it is to the truth, I can never be sure—she is literally backing toward the door. And yes, I
missed it. You weren’t here. I missed you.

  I missed you too, I’m saying, but what should be an olive branch feels like a blow. I want to hurt her. I want to make things better. I want to be anywhere but this moment, which is why I keep coming back to it. But things are—this is important. You know? It’s really fucking important.

  A lot of things are important. She’s fading. Red shift. The blackness that is the hallway and the night. There is an entire universe outside of us and I’m losing her to it. We’re important. We were. Now I’m going to go do something important by myself. I’m sorry. I’ll call you.

  She didn’t. I never blamed her for that.

  The higher functions of the sensory array are not salvageable. I’m not sure how long it takes for me to discover this, but in the end I’m sweating and aching, my muscles tense with the effort of untangling miles of digital pathways only to discover total burnout. A blackened hulk where a fantastic intricacy of pseudo-organic computing used to be, comprising all of the parts of CERA that are devoted to the analysis of where we are, when we are, what’s around us and how close and how big it is and what it’s made of and what we should do in response to all of that information. Chronometrics is adjacent in the solid-spin core. It’s all gone.

  I’m sweating against the cocoon’s padding. I want to beat against the sides of the thing until I’ve pounded my fists into fucking pulp. I want out. And what would I see?

  I can’t fix what’s burned out in transit. I don’t even know what happened to burn it out. That piece of time is blank in the logs, just as much a charred lump of uselessness as the broken array.

  We didn’t plan for this because we couldn’t. But I know it’s more than that. We didn’t plan for it because we moved too fast. Because I did. Because I was running.

  Here is a memory that isn’t a dream. It doesn’t need to be. I have this one saved. I have them all saved, all her vlogs, but I don’t watch most of them. There are two that I come back to, over and over. They’re the only two I need, because while the others can hurt me, it’s only background. After this long, I am refined in my taste for self-torture.

  The first one: it’s only fifteen minutes long. She’s showing the viewer around the village where she’s working—it’s mostly huts made from tin and wood and mud. Large families crowd outside several of them, the children naked, the older children and the women wrapped in brightly-colored fabric. Dogs roam the dirt. Mothers carry impossibly heavy loads on their heads. Men stand with farming implements in their hands or lean against ancient trucks, squinting into the sun.

  You know this. You’ve seen it before. It’s beyond a trope, beyond cliché—it’s what we build to look at when seeing is too hard.

  But here’s the thing. Two things. I saw them immediately.

  The first thing is that the people are smiling. They’re waving. This isn’t some kind of appeal for charity or pity. The women look happy: they laugh together and I see them pull Kendra into a hug. The men nod and say things I don’t understand. They gesture at one of the trucks, the bed of which is piled with sacks of what might be grain. The children are skinny but they don’t look unhealthy. The sun is high and hot—I can practically feel it through the screen, sucking the moisture out of my skin—but they don’t look beaten down by it. They show me things. Their village well. They show me their school, which is a room filled with neat rows of desks and a wall covered with crayon drawings. At the front of the room is a wide LCD screen.

  The message is clear: these people are doing well. Whatever has been done there is working. The video is meant to be seen by particular people with access to particular bank accounts, and as such I know what I see is filtered and framed for consumption, but I also believe it, because it feels true. It doesn’t feel like clever staging. What she and her group were doing—it was working.

  And here is the second thing I see: Kendra, Kendra smiling, tucking a glossy black strand of hair behind her ear. Kendra smiling with her already dark skin darkened further by the sun and wind—dark and glowing like the heart of a coal. Kendra, happier than I ever remember seeing her with me.

  The message beneath the message is clear, and the fact that I know that she never meant for me to see it makes no difference at all. Leaving me was the best choice she could have made.

  I don’t blame her, or them, or anyone. But it doesn’t help. There’s no one left alive to blame.

  Troubleshooting is different when the computer has been jacked directly into your brain for the better part of two years. You know it like you know your own internal workings, which is to say not well at all. But you can feel your way through it in a more instinctive fashion. You’re fumbling in a dark room—in a very systematic way, in a grid pattern, protocol by protocol—but you feel that it’s a room in which you already know the layout. You’ve been here before. You saw it once, in a memory. In a dream.

  I lose time when I’m fully interfaced with CERA’s systems. Some of it is simple micro-focus, and some of it is that inside CERA, time doesn’t work the same way—I always found that appropriate, considering what we do. So I’m not sure how long I work inside her, feeling the pieces of her back together, turning them to make them fit, discarding the ones that seem twisted or misshapen beyond repair. At some point I feel a buzz and I pull back enough to hear her.

  Partial array function has been restored. Gravimetrics are online. Proximity detection is online. All other sensory systems remain non-functional. Chronometrics are still non-functional. Same old, same old.

  When I bite down on my bottom lip, enough of me is still in my body to feel the pain. It’s better than nothing. What about visuals?

  The visual feed is functional, she says again, and she sounds impatient, all amusement gone. And then she’s silent. Because what else can she really say?

  I don’t know how long I join her in the quiet. I’m out of her and back in me, but time is still slippery, and with chronometrics offline it feels unreal. Which I guess it always was. But at last I stir and open my eyes into the darkness again.

  Okay. We’ll work with what we have. CERA, if the beacon is still—

  Proximity alert. We are approaching an object. I go still in the cocoon, already vaulting to assumptions. We’re okay. We’re going to be saved.

  Even if some part of me knows better.

  Here is a memory that will never be a dream. I never get that far. I can approach it in sleep, but as soon as the shape of it comes into view I’m plunging back up, too breathless and too exhausted to scream.

  I see it—I am seeing it—on the news, before I know what I’m looking at. It’s shaky cell phone footage, and it’s a wall of water advancing on a shitty little town somewhere and none of this is unusual enough to get my attention, even if I know somewhere in the rear corners of my attention that this one is different.

  Here’s what happens: the water is coming and it’s swallowing everything. It’s like someone is pulling a blanket of water up over the land. I’m sitting in a bar near the lab, drinking off a long day, and as I’m watching, idle and only half interested, I’m not sure if it’s live or if it happened already. Not like it matters.

  And I see her.

  It’s just a second. After, I spend days going over footage and photos and info on where she was then, friends, her mother—God, her mother, who I never liked talking to even when we were still together—and then I go over the body counts and the casualty reports, like I can bend the numbers a different way if I focus hard enough.

  Like I can run time backward. Just like that.

  But I see her, and she’s scrambling up an embankment with a crowd of people so wet and muddy they barely look human, and then the embankment crumbles under them and they all go down. I don’t see her face when she drowns. My imagination does the heavy lifting for me.

  Kendra. Jesus Christ.

  How many people died that day? All that time staring at the numbers and I’m honestly still not sure. No one’s sure, of course, but we love to
count, don’t we? I know it was thousands. Tens of thousands. I cared about one in all of them. Does that make me a heartless bitch? Was that always part of the problem? Is that where entropy starts?

  I can’t change anything, Kendra. But you know I was trying. You know I still am.

  I’d twist time around my fingers for you.

  Is it a ship? I hadn’t realized how frantic I was getting. Now I can feel it in the strain of my own inner voice. CERA, is it a satellite? Can we—?

  Careful, Vita. Gravimetrics indicate that the object is extremely dense. A closer approach is likely to make escape from its gravitational field difficult.

  We don’t have the thrust sufficient to climb a gravity well. We launched in space. I tense up and clutch at what’s around me like I can control it with my muscles.

  CERA, full stop.

  I know I can’t feel us pull to an easy, reverse-thrusted halt in space, but I still feel as though I can. And I feel that thing out there, whatever it is. The thing I’m blind to. I’m in a dark room and now I know there’s something in here with me. Not a satellite. Obviously too much pull. A planet? A star?

  I’m so pissed at the malfunctioning visuals, I wish I could tear them out of my eyes. And then I’d really be blind, drifting and bleeding, but I’m suddenly so pissed it almost feels worth it.

  What is it,CERA?

  Tough to say. Density is estimated at 1 x 1013—but it’s only an estimate. Alpha, beta, gamma, and electromagnetic radiation are all minimal.

  No heat or light to speak of. Not a star. Unless.

  God.

  Everything here is wild speculation. That I’m even here is wild speculation—we were pretty sure this would work, but we weren’t positive. Time, space, how exactly the mechanics of both would work when my little craft shoved them in a blender and hit puree—we didn’t know. It’s too much to call this an experiment: we were flailing around in the dark. I wasn’t afraid of that. But a lot can change in a few million years. If something went wrong. If I went too far. If I’m not where and when I should be.