Saki spent the final hours before the expedition in a departmental meeting, arguing with Dr. Li about site selection. When was easy. Archronologists burrowed into the Chronicle starting at the present moment and proceeding backward through layers of time, following much the same principles as used in an archaeological dig. The spatial location was trickier to choose. M.J. had believed that the plague was alien, and if he was right, the warehouse that housed the alien artifacts would be a good starting point.
“How can you argue for anything but the colony medical center?” Li demanded. “The colonists died of a plague.”
“The hospital at the present moment is unlikely to have any useful information,” Saki said. The final decision was hers, but she wanted the research team to understand the rationale for her choice. “Everyone in the colony is dead, and we have their medical records up to the point of the final broadcast. The colonists suspected that the plague was alien in origin. We should start with the xenoarchaeology warehouse.”
There were murmurs of agreement and disagreement from the students and postdocs.
“Didn’t your lifelove work in the xenoarchaeology lab?” The question came from Annabelle Hoffman, one of Li’s graduate students.
The entire room went silent.
Saki opened her mouth, then closed it. It was information from M.J. that had led her to suggest starting at the xenoarchaeology warehouse. Would she have acted on that information if it had come from someone else? She believed that she would, but what if her love for M.J. was biasing her decisions?
“You’re out of line, Hoffman.” Li turned to Saki. “I apologize for Annabelle. I disagree with your choice of site, but it is inappropriate of her to make this personal. Everyone on this ship has lost someone down there.”
Saki was grateful to Li for diffusing the situation. They were academic rivals, yes, but they’d grown to be friends. “Thank you.”
Li nodded, then launched into a long-winded argument for the hospital as an initial site. Saki was still reeling from the personal attack. Annabelle was taking notes onto her tablet, scowling at having been rebuked. Saki hated departmental politics, hated conflict. M.J. had always been her sounding board to talk her through this kind of thing, and he was gone. Maybe she shouldn’t do this. Li was a brilliant researcher. The project would be in good hands if she stepped down.
Suddenly the room went quiet. Li had finished laying out her arguments, and everyone was waiting for Saki’s response.
Hyun-sik came to her rescue and systematically countered Li’s arguments. He was charming and persuasive, and by the end of the meeting he had convinced the group to go along with the plan to visit the xenoarchaeology warehouse first.
Saki hoped it was the right choice.
* * *
There is no objective record of the moments in your past—you filter reality through your thoughts and perceptions. Over time, you create a memory of the memory, compounding bias upon bias, layers of self-serving rationalizations, or denial, or nostalgia. Everything becomes a story. You visit the Chronicle to study us, but what you see isn’t absolute truth. The record of our past is filtered through your minds.
The control room for the temporal projector looked like the navigation bridge of an interstellar ship. A single person could work the controls, but half the department was packed into the room—most longing for a connection to the people they’d lost, others simply eager to be a part of this historic moment, the first expedition to the dead colony of New Mars.
Saki waited with Hyun-sik in the containment cylinder, a large chamber with padded walls and floors. At twenty meters in diameter and nearly two stories high, it was the largest open area on the ship. Cameras on the ceiling recorded everything that she and Hyun-sik did. From the perspective of people staying on the ship, the expedition team would flicker, disappear briefly, and return an instant later—possibly in a different location. This was the purpose of the padded floors and walls: to cushion falls and prevent injury in the event that they returned at a slightly different altitude.
The straps of Saki’s pack chafed her shoulders. She and Hyun-sik stood back to back, not moving, although stillness was not strictly necessary. The projector could transport moving objects as easily as stationary ones. As long as they weren’t half inside the room and half outside of it, everything would be fine. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Hyun-sik confirmed.
Over the ceiling-mounted speakers, the robotic voice of the projection system counted down from twenty. Saki forced herself to breathe.
“. . . three, two, one.”
Their surroundings faded to black, then brightened into the cavernous warehouse that served as artifact storage for the xenoarchaeology lab. The placement was good. Saki and Hyun-sik floated in an empty aisle. Two rows of brightly colored alien artifacts towered above them. Displacement damage from their arrival was minimal; nothing of interest was likely to be in the middle of the aisle.
Silence pressed down on them. The Chronicle recorded light but not sound, and they were like projections, there without really being there. M.J. could have explained it better. This was not her first time in the Chronicle, but the lack of sound was always unnerving. There was no ambient noise, or even her own breathing and heartbeat.
“Mark location.” Saki typed her words in the air, her tiny motions barely visible but easily detected by the sensors in her gloves. Her instructions appeared in the corner of Hyun-sik’s glasses. She and her student set the location on their wristbands. The projection cylinder was twenty meters in diameter, and moving beyond that area in physical space could be catastrophic upon return. The second expedition into the Chronicle had ended with the research team reappearing inside the concrete foundation of the Chronos lab.
“Location marked,” Hyun-sik confirmed.
Saki studied the artifacts that surrounded her. She had no idea if they were machinery or art or some kind of alien toy. Hell, for all she knew, they might be waste products or alien carapaces. They looked manufactured rather than biological, though—smooth, flat-bottomed ovoids that reminded her of escape pods or maybe giant eggs.
The closest artifact on her left was about three times her height and had a base of iridescent blue, dotted with specks of red, crisscrossed with a delicate lace of green and gray and black. The base, which extended to roughly the midline of each ovoid, was uniform across all the artifacts in the warehouse. The tops, however, were all different. Several were shades of green with various amounts of brown mixed in. The one immediately to her right was topped with swirls of browns and beige and grayish-white and a red so dark it looked almost black. M.J. had been so thrilled to unearth these wondrous things.
Something about them bothered her though. She vaguely remembered M.J. describing them as blue, and while that was true of the bases—
Hyun-sik pulled off his pack.
“Wait.” Saki used the microjets on her suit to turn and face her student. He was surrounded in a semitranslucent shimmer of silvery-white, the colors of the Chronicle all swirled together where his presence disrupted it, like the dirt of an archaeological dig all churned together. At the edges of his displacement cloud there was a delicate rainbow film, like the surface of a soap bubble, data distorted but not yet destroyed.
“Sorry,” Hyun-sik messaged. “Everything looked clear in my direction.”
Saki scanned the warehouse. The recording drones would have no problem collecting data on the alien artifacts. Her job was to look for anomalies, things the drones might miss or inadvertently destroy. She studied the ceiling of the warehouse. A maintenance walkway wrapped around the building, a platform of silvery mesh suspended from the lighter silver metal of the ceiling. The walkway was higher than the two-story ceiling of the containment cylinder, outside of their priority area. On the walkway, near one of the bright ceiling lights, something looked odd. “I don’t think we were the first ones here.”
Hyun-sik followed her gaze. “Displacement cloud?”
&
nbsp; “There, by the lights.” Saki studied the shape on the walkway. It was hard to tell at this distance, but the displacement cloud was roughly the right size to be human. “Unfortunately we have no way to get up there for a closer look.”
“I can reprogram a few of the bees—”
“Yes.” It was not ideal. Drones were good at recording physical objects, but had difficulty picking up the outlines of distortion clouds and other anomalies. Moving through the Chronicle was difficult, though not impossible. It was similar to free fall in open space. Things you brought with you were solid, but everything else was basically a projection.
“It is too far for the microjets,” Hyun-sik continued, “but we could tie ourselves together and push off each other so that someone could have a closer look.”
Saki had been considering that very option, but it was too dangerous. If something went wrong and they couldn’t get back to their marks, they could reappear inside a station wall, or off the ship entirely, or in a location occupied by another person. She wanted desperately to take a closer look, because if the distortion cloud was human-shaped it meant . . . “No. It’s too risky. We’ll send drones.”
There was nothing else that merited a more thorough investigation, so they released the recording drones, a flying army of bee-sized cameras that recorded every object from multiple angles. Seventeen drones flew to the ceiling and recorded the region of the walkway that had the distortion. Saki hoped the recording would be detailed enough to be useful. The disruption to the Chronicle was like ripples in a pond, spreading from the present into the past and future record, tiny trails of white blurring together into a jumbled cloud.
M.J. had always followed the minimalist school of archronology; he liked to observe the Chronicle from a single unobtrusive spot. He had disapproved of recording equipment, of cameras and drones. It would be so like him to stand on an observation walkway, far above the scene he wanted to observe. But this moment was in his future, a part of the Chronicle that hadn’t been laid down yet when he died. There was no way for him to be here.
The drones had exhausted all the open space and started flying through objects to gather data on their internal properties. By the time the drones flew back into their transport box, the warehouse was a cloud of white with only traces of the original data.
* * *
We did not begin here. The urge to expand and grow came to us from another relationship. They came to us, and we learned their love of exploration, which eventually led us to you. It doesn’t matter that we arrive here before you, we are patient, we will wait.
The reconstruction lab was crammed full of people—students and postdocs and faculty carefully combing through data from the drones on tablets, occasionally projecting data onto the wall to get a better look at the details. The 3D printer hummed, printing small-scale reproductions of the alien artifacts.
“The initial reports we received described the artifact bases, but not the tops.” Li’s voice rose over the general din of the room. “The artifacts changed sometime after the colony stopped sending reports.”
Annabelle said something in response, but Saki couldn’t quite make it out. She shook her head and tried to focus on the drone recordings from the seventeen drones that had flown to the ceiling to investigate the anomaly. It was a human outline, which meant that they weren’t the first ones to visit that portion of the Chronicle. Saki couldn’t make out the figure’s features. She wasn’t sure if the lack of resolution was due to the drones having difficulty recording something that wasn’t technically an object, or if the person had moved enough to blur the cloud they left behind.
She wanted desperately to believe that it was M.J. An unmoving human figure was consistent with his minimalist style of research. Visiting a future Chronicle was forbidden, and only theoretically possible, but under the circumstances—
“Any luck?” Dr. Li interrupted her train of thought.
Saki shook her head. “Someone was clearly in this part of the Chronicle before us, and the outline is human. Beyond that I don’t think we will get anything else from these damn drone recordings.”
“Shame you couldn’t get up there to get a closer look.” There was a mischievous sparkle in Li’s eyes when she said it, almost like it was a backwards-in-time dare, a challenge.
“Too risky,” Saki said. “And we might not have gotten more than what came off the drones. If it had been just me, I might have chanced it, but I’m responsible for the safety of my student—”
“I’m only teasing,” Li said softly. “Sorry. This is a hard expedition for all of us. The captain is pushing for answers and Annabelle is trying to convince anyone who will listen that we need a surface mission to look at the original artifacts.”
“Foolishness. We can’t even get a working probe down there, we couldn’t possibly send people. Maybe the next expedition into the Chronicle will bring us more answers.”
“I hope so.”
Dr. Li went back to supervising the work at the 3D printer. Like M.J., her research spanned both archronology and xenoarchaeology, and her team was doing most of the artifact reconstruction and analysis. They were in a difficult position—the captain wanted answers now about whether the artifacts were dangerous, but something so completely alien could take years of research to decipher, if they were even knowable at all.
* * *
Someone chooses which part of our story is told. Sometimes it is you, and sometimes it is us. We repeat ourselves because we always focus on the same things, we structure our narratives in the same ways. You are no different. Some things change, but others always stay the same. Eventually our voices will blend together to create something beautiful and new. We learned anticipation before we met you, and you know it too, though you do not feel it for us.
When Saki returned to her family quarters, she messaged Kenzou. He did not respond. Off with Hyun-sik, probably. Saki ordered scotch (neat) from the replicator, and savored the burn down her throat as she sipped it. This particular scotch was one of M.J.’s creations, heavy on smoke but light on peat, with just the tiniest bit of sweetness at the end.
She played one of M.J.’s old vid letters on her tablet. He rambled cheerfully about his day, the artifacts he’d dug up at the site of the abandoned alien ruins, his plan to someday visit that part of the Chronicle with Saki so that they could see the aliens at the height of their civilization. He was trying to solve the mystery of why the aliens had left the planet—there was no trace of them, not a single scrap of organic remains. They’d had long back-and-forth discussions on whether the aliens were simply so biologically foreign that the remains were unrecognizable. Perhaps the city itself was the alien, or their bodies were ephemeral, or the artifacts somehow stored their remains. So many slowtime conversations, in vid letters back and forth from Earth. Then a backlog of vids that M.J. had sent while she was in stasis for the interstellar trip.
This vid was from several months before she woke, one of the last before M.J. started showing signs of the plague that wiped out the colony. Saki barely listened to the words. She lost herself in M.J.’s deep brown eyes and let the soothing sound of his voice wash over her.
“Octavia’s parakeet up and died last night,” M.J. said.
His words brought Saki back to the present. The parakeet reminded Saki of something from another letter, or had it been one of M.J.’s lecture transcripts? He’d said something about crops failing, first outside of the domes and later even in the greenhouses. Plants, animals, humans—everything in the colony had died. Everyone on the ship assumed that the crops and animals had died because the people of the colony had gotten too sick to tend them, but what if the plague had taken out everything?
She had to find out.
Most of M.J.’s letters she had watched many times, but there was one she’d seen only once because she couldn’t bear to relive the pain of it. The last letter. She called it up on her tablet, then drank the rest of her scotch before hitting Play. M.J.’s hair was sh
aved to a short black stubble and his face was sallow and sunken. He was in the control room of the colony’s temporal projector, working on his research right up until the end.
“They can’t isolate a virus. Our immune systems seem to be attacking something, but we have no idea what, or why, and our bodies are breaking down. How can we stop something if we can’t figure out what it is?
“I will hold on as long as I can, my lifelove, but the plague is accelerating. Don’t come to the surface, use the Chronicle. Whatever this is, it has to be alien.”
She closed her eyes and listened to him describe the fall of the colony. If she closed her eyes and ignored the content of the words, if she forced herself not to hear the frailness in his voice, if she pushed away all the realities she could not accept—it was like he was still down there, a quick shuttle hop away, waiting for her to join him.
“The transmission systems have started to go. This alien world is harsh, and without our entire colony fighting to make it hospitable, everything is failing, all our efforts falling apart. Entropy will turn us all to dust. This will probably be my last letter, but perhaps when you arrive you will see me in the Chronicle.
“Keep fighting. Live for both of us. I love you.”
“You home, Mom?” Kenzou called out as he came in. “I’m going out with Hyun-sik tonight, but . . . are you crying? What happened?”
Saki rubbed away the tears and gestured down at the tablet. “Vids. The old letters.”
Kenzou hugged her. “I miss him too, but you shouldn’t watch those. You need to hold yourself together until the expeditions are done.”
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Page 21