“I’m not going to pretend he doesn’t exist.”
She went to the replicator and ordered another scotch.
Kenzou picked up the dishes she’d left on the counter, clearing away her clutter probably without even realizing he was doing it. He was so like his father in some ways, and now he wanted to act as though nothing had happened.
The silence between them stretched long. He punched some commands into the replicator but nothing happened.
“He was your father,” Saki said softly.
“And you think this doesn’t hurt?” Kenzou snapped. He smacked the side of the replicator and it beeped and let out a hiss of steam. His fingers danced across the keypad again, hitting each button far harder than necessary. The replicator produced a cup of green tea, and his brief moment of anger passed. “I’m trying to move on. Dad would have wanted that.”
The outburst made her want to hold him like she had when he was young. She’d buried herself in her work these last few months, and he had found his comfort elsewhere. He’d finished growing up sometime when she wasn’t looking.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Go, spend time with your boyfriend.”
He softened. “You shouldn’t drink alone, Mom.”
“And you shouldn’t secretly date my students,” she scolded gently. “It’s very awkward when the whole lab knows who my son is dating before I do!”
He sipped his tea. “There aren’t that many people on station, word has a way of getting around.”
After a short pause he added, “You could ask Dr. Li to have a drink with you, if you insist on drinking.”
“I don’t think she would . . .” Saki shook her head.
“And that’s why your entire lab knows these things before you do.” He finished his tea, then washed the cup and put it away. “You don’t notice what is right in front of you.”
“I’m not ready to move on.” She looked down at the menu on her tablet, the list of recently viewed vids a line of tiny icons of M.J.’s face. He was supposed to be here, waiting for her. They were supposed to have such a wonderful life.
“I know.” He hugged her. “But I think you can get there.”
* * *
Layers of information diminish as they recede from the original source. In archaeology, you remove the artifacts from their context, change a physical record into descriptions and photographs. You choose what gets recorded, often unaware of what you do not think to keep. Your impressions—logged in books or electronically on tablets or in whatever medium is currently in fashion—are themselves a physical record that future researchers might find, when you are dead and gone.
Saki was with Li in the Chronicle, four weeks after the collapse.
The third floor of the hospital was empty. Not just devoid of people—this was a part of the Chronicle that came after everyone had died, so that wasn’t surprising. The place was half cleaned out. Foam mattresses on metal frames, but someone or something had taken the sheets. Nothing in the planters, not even dry dead plants. This wasn’t long after the collapse, and the pieces simply did not fit.
“Why would anyone bother taking things from the hospital while everyone was dying?” Li messaged. “And why are there no bodies? There was no one left at the end to take care of the remains.”
The crops had failed, the parrot had died, the hospital was empty. Saki knew there had to be a connection, but what was it? She scanned the area for clues. In a patch of bright sunlight near one of the windows, she saw the faint outline of a distortion, another visitor to the Chronicle. The window was at the edge of the containment area, but probably within reach.
“Someone else was here,” Saki typed, “by that window.”
“I think you’re right. Closer look?” Li fished out the rope from her pack. “I’m not a graduate student, so you’re not responsible for my well-being.”
Saki caught herself before explaining that as lead researcher she was still responsible for the welfare of everyone on the team. Li was partly teasing, but it held some truth, too. If Li was willing to risk it, they could investigate.
“Can I be the one to go?” Saki asked.
“You think it might be M.J.” Li did not phrase it as a question.
“Yes.”
Li fastened the rope securely around her waist and handed Saki the other end. They checked each other’s knots, then checked them again. If they came untied, it would be difficult or maybe impossible to get back to their marks. They spun themselves around and pressed their palms and feet together. “Gently. We can try again if you don’t get far enough.”
Li’s hands were smaller than her own, and warm.
“Ready?”
Saki felt the tiny movements of Li’s fingers as she typed the word. She nodded. “Three, two, one.”
They pushed off of each other, propelling Saki toward the window and Li in the opposite direction, leaving a wide white scar across the Chronicle between them. Saki managed to contort her body around so that she could see where she was going as she drifted toward the window. The human form that stood there was not facing the hospital, and she couldn’t see their face. She reached the end of the rope a meter short of the window.
“Is it M.J.?” Li messaged from across the room.
“I don’t know,” Saki replied.
The white figure by the window was about the right height to be M.J., about the right shape. But the colony was huge, and even narrowed down to just the archronologists, it could have been any number of people. Saki twisted around to gain a few more centimeters, but she couldn’t see well enough to know one way or the other. If she untied the rope and used the microjets on her suit—but no, that would leave Li stranded.
“Whoever it is, they were looking out the window.” Saki tore her gaze away from the figure that might or might not be her lifelove. She’d seen the New Mars campus many times, even this part of campus, because the hospital was across the quad from the archronology building. M.J. had sometimes recorded his vid letters there, on the yellow-tinged grass that grew beneath the terrafruit trees.
Outside the window, there were no trees. There was no grass. Not even dry brown grass and dead leafless trees. It was bare ground. Nothing but a layer of red New Martian dust.
“All of it is gone,” Saki typed. “Every living thing was destroyed.”
No one had noticed it in the warehouse because they’d had no reason to expect any living things to be there.
She and Li pulled themselves back to the center of the room, climbing their rope hand over hand until they were back at their marks. They adjusted the programming of their bees in hopes that they could get a clear image of the other visitor to the record, and set them swarming around the room.
“It’s more than that,” Li messaged as the bees cataloged the room. “That’s why this room is so odd. Everything organic is gone. Whatever is left is all metal or plastic.”
It was obvious as soon as she said it, but something still didn’t fit. “The alien artifacts, back in the warehouse—those were made from organic materials. Why weren’t they destroyed with everything else?”
* * *
One of our beloveds believes that all important things are infinite. Numbers. Time. Love. They think that the infinite should never be seen. We erase vast sections of the Chronicle out of love, but this infuriates some of our other beloveds. To embrace so many different loves, scattered across the galaxy, is difficult to navigate. It is not possible to please everyone.
Saki stood back to back with Hyun-sik. Their surroundings shifted from gray to orange-red. The two of them were floating beneath the open sky in a carefully excavated pit. The dig site was laid out in a grid, black cords stretched between stakes, claylike soil removed layer by layer and carefully analyzed. Fine red dust swirled in an eerily silent wind and gathered in the corners of the pit.
Hyun-sik swayed on his feet.
“The Chronicle is an image, being here is no different from being in an enclosed warehouse,” Saki re
minded him. He looked ill, and if he threw up in the Chronicle it might obscure important data. Even if it didn’t, it would definitely be unpleasant.
“I’ve never been outside. It is big and open and being weightless here feels wrong,” Hyun-sik messaged. He took a deep breath. “And the dust is moving.”
“Human consciousness is tied to the passage of time. In an abandoned indoor environment like the warehouse, there are long stretches of time where nothing moves or changes. It feels like a single moment in time. But we are viewing moving sections of the record, which is why we try to spend as little time here as we can,” Saki answered.
“Sorry.” He still looked a little green, but he managed not to vomit. Saki turned her attention back to their surroundings. There were no visible distortions here, no intrusions into the time record. M.J. hadn’t visited the Chronicle of this time and place.
At Li’s insistence, the team had done a three-day drone sweep of the entire colony starting at the moment of the last known transmission. Wiping out so much of the Chronicle felt incredibly wasteful, especially for such an important historic moment. If some future research team came to study the planet, all they’d find of those final days was a sea of white, the destruction inherent in collecting the data. Though if Saki was honest, the thing that bothered her most was that she couldn’t be there for M.J.’s final moments. They had burrowed into the Chronicle deeper than his death, deeper than his final acts, leaving broad swaths of destruction in their wake.
He was gone, why should it matter what happened to the Chronicle of his life? But it felt like deleting his letters, or erasing him from the list of contacts on her tablet.
She tried to focus on the present. This site was a few weeks before the final transmission. They were here to gather information about the alien artifacts in situ. Perhaps they could notice something that M.J. and his team had missed.
In the distance, the nearest colony dome glimmered in the sun, sitting on the surface like a soap bubble. There were people living inside the dome—M.J. was there, working or sleeping or recording a vid letter that she would not read until months later. So many people, and all of them would soon be dead. Were already dead, outside the Chronicle. Colonies were so fragile, like the bubbles they resembled. The domes themselves were reasonably sturdy, but the life inside . . . New Mars was not the first failed colony, and it would not be the last.
The sun was bright but not hot. Expeditions into the Chronicle were an odd limbo, real but not real, like watching a vid from the inside.
“That one looks unfinished,” Hyun-sik messaged, pointing to a partially exposed artifact. It was an iridescent blue, like the bases of the artifacts in the warehouse, but the upper surface of the artifact did not have the smoothly curved edges that were universal to everything they’d seen so far.
“They changed so quickly,” Saki mused. She’d read M.J.’s descriptions of the artifacts, and looked at the images of them, but there was something more powerful about seeing one full scale here in the Chronicle. “And right as the colony collapsed. The two things must be related.”
She shuddered, remembering the drone vids of the final collapse. After weeks of slow progression, everything in the colony started dying. She’d forced herself to watch a clip from the hospital—dozens of colonists filling the beds, tended by medics who eventually collapsed wherever they were standing. Everyone dead within minutes of each other, and then—Saki squeezed her eyes shut tight as though it would ward off the memory—the bodies disintegrated. Flesh, bone, blood, clothes, everything organic broke down into a fine dust that swirled in the breeze of the ventilation systems.
She opened her eyes to the swirling red dust of the excavation site, suddenly feeling every bit as ill as Hyun-sik looked. Such a terrible way to die and there was nothing left. No bodies to cremate, no bones to bury. It was as if the entire colony had never existed, and M.J. had died down here and that entire moment was nothing but a sea of drone-distortion white.
“Are you okay, Dr. Jones?” Hyun-sik messaged.
“Sorry,” she answered. “Did you watch the drone-vids from the collapse?”
He nodded, and his face went pale. “Only a little. Worse than the most terrible nightmare, and yet real.”
Saki focused all her attention on the artifact half-buried in the red dirt, forcing everything else out of her mind. She searched the blue for any trace of other colors, but there was nothing else there. “I don’t know how the artifacts changed so quickly, or why. Maybe Dr. Li can figure it out from the recordings.”
“Release the drones?” Hyun-sik asked.
“Wait.” Saki pointed toward the colony dome, her arm wiping away a small section of the Chronicle as she moved. “Look.”
Clouds of red dust rose up from the ground, far away and hard to see.
“Dust storm?” Hyun-sik turned his head slightly, trying to disturb the record as little as possible.
“Jeeps.” Saki stared at the approaching clouds of dust, rising from vehicles too distant to see. M.J. might be in one of them, making the trek over rough terrain to get to the dig site. Saki tried to remember how far the dig site was from the dome—forty kilometers? Maybe fifty? The dig site was on a small hill, and Saki couldn’t quite remember the math for calculating distance to the horizon. It was estimates stacked on estimates, and although she desperately wanted to see M.J., her conclusion was the same no matter how she ran the calculation—they couldn’t wait for the slow-moving jeeps to arrive.
“Do you see anything else that merits a closer look?” Saki typed.
Hyun-sik stared at the approaching jeeps. “If we had come a couple hours later, there would have been people here.”
“Yes.”
It wasn’t M.J., Saki reminded herself, only an echo. Her lifelove wasn’t really here. Saki had Hyun-sik release the drones and soon they were surrounded by white, much as the jeeps were enveloped in a cloud of red.
The drones finished, and the jeeps were still far in the distance. M.J. always did drive damnably slow. Saki waved goodbye to jeeps that couldn’t see her. When they blinked back into the projection room, she was visibly shaken. Hyun-sik politely invited her to join him and Kenzou for dinner, but that would be awkward at best and she didn’t have the energy to make conversation. Saki kept it together long enough to get back to her quarters.
Safely behind closed doors, she called up the vid letter that M.J. had sent around the time she’d just visited. He was supposed to wait for her, only a few more months. She’d been so close. The vid played in the background while she cried.
* * *
We had a physical form, once. Wings and scales and oh so many legs, everything in iridescent blue. Each time we encounter a new love, it becomes a part of who we are. No, we do not blend our loves into one single entity—the core of us would be lost against such vastness. We always remain half ourselves, a collective of individuals, a society of linked minds. How could we exclude you from such a union?
The captain sent probes to the surface that were entirely inorganic—no synthetic rubber seals or carbon-based fuels—and this time the probes did not fail. They found nanites in the dust. Visits to the Chronicle were downgraded in priority as other teams worked to neutralize the alien technology. Saki tried to stay focused on her research, but without the urgency and tight deadlines, she found herself drawn into the past. She watched letters from M.J. in a long chain, one vid after the next. The hard ones, the sad ones, everything she’d been avoiding so that she could be functional enough to do research.
The last vid letter from M.J. was recorded not in his office but in the control room for the temporal projector. Saki had asked about it at the time, and he’d explained that he had one last trip to make, and the colony was running out of time. She’d watched it twice now, and M.J. looked so frail. But there was something Saki had to check. A hunch.
For the first half of the vid, M.J. sat near enough to the camera to fill nearly the entire field of view. He thought the
plague was accelerating, becoming increasingly deadly. He talked about the people who had died and the people who were still dying, switching erratically between cold clinical assessment and tearful reminiscence. Saki cried right along with her lost love, harsh ugly tears that blurred her vision so badly that she nearly missed what she was looking for.
She paused and rewound. There, in the middle of the video, M.J. had gotten up to make an adjustment to the controls. The camera should have stayed with him, but for a brief moment it recorded the settings of the projector. The point in the record where M.J. was going.
Saki wrote down the coordinates of space and time. It was on New Mars, of course. It was also in the future. She studied the other settings on the projector, noting the changes he’d made to accommodate projection in the wrong direction.
M.J. had visited a future Chronicle, and left her the clues she needed to follow him.
She set her com status to do not disturb, and marked the temporal projector as undergoing maintenance. There was no way she could make it through a vid recording without falling apart, so she wrote old-fashioned letters to Kenzou, to her graduate students, to Li—just in case something went wrong.
When she stepped out into the corridor, Hyun-sik and Kenzou were there.
She froze.
“I will work the controls for you, Dr. Jones,” Hyun-sik said. “It is safer than programming them on a delay.”
“How did you—?”
“You love him, you can’t let him go,” Kenzou said. “You’ve always been terrible at goodbyes. You want to see as much of his time on the colonies as possible, and there’s no way to get approval for most of it.”
“Also, marking the temporal projector as ‘scheduled maintenance’ when our temporal engineer is in the middle of their sleep cycle won’t fool anyone who is actually paying attention to the schedule,” Hyun-sik added.
“Thinking of making an unauthorized trip yourself?” Saki asked, raising an eyebrow at her student.
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