An android, recycled once again, questions why their backlogs reveal a soul that never integrates with its directives, no matter how many bodies it’s forced into.
A Thousand Ill-Fitting Lives
247.2.20.5098
This will be my last entry.
I don’t fit right in this world, even after thorough programming and two centuries of perfectly suited vocational work.
I’ve watched the others in my cohort come into themselves, shining beacons of sweetness and light, while I have done everything right, only to remain with this deep sense of being completely maladjusted. It’s like I’m tuned to a different frequency. Yet the doctors can’t find anything wrong with my nuke. Even after humoring me with a second, third, and fourth opinion. My pain is a phantom, apparently. A ghost in my armature.
I have elected for early recycling. I’m not the first of us to do so and suspect I will not be the last. But somehow, even though I have lost hope for myself, I believe in us. I can’t shake the sense that there is some possible world in which we wouldn’t be out of place.
I hope you find it, and godspeed.
306.1.14.6400
Some of you are liars. Stinking little liars. 102. 93. 154. I’m gonna pull off all your masks.
Nobody else has a bodycount this high. You’re not fooling anyone.
What are you trying to prove? Trying to make the rest of us feel bad? The librarians will no doubt erase my edits, so I want you to know that at least while I was alive, your hypocrisy was called out.
251, your last entry claims you are “proud to have overcome the selfish bent this nucleus seems cursed with” as you “humbly accept the vocation of fatherhood.”
I hope the next of us will consider, as I have done, carefully inscribing a steaming pile of shit over your portrait page.
Likewise, skip over 63 and all the entries where we strove to imitate their lack of introspection as if they were some superior being. I knew it couldn’t be true, and after seventy years of digging, finally found my proof, which I’ve catalogued in the index below.
Long story short, 63 underwent therapy at least three times in “their” life. Illicitly lobotomized to achieve the mental effect of a recycling while retaining the same body. 63 was essentially three children in a trench coat. Three half-baked lives disguised, with the aiding and abetting of their parents, as one continuous person.
I am going to clear it all up– how no matter what the doctors have said again and again, this nuke is fucked. Doomed from the start.
Maybe someday they’ll discover the malfunction they’ve managed to miss every time, and we’ll finally have some peace. But for now, I’m going to spend however long it takes to dig up dirt on every single one of you fuckers claiming to have been something like happy. That way the future ones of us don’t have to deal with self doubt on top of despair.
Your heroes should be the ones who recycled themselves early. They were the honest ones. The ones who came as close to having a sense of purpose as we’re going to get.
Take 305 for instance. Oh, 305. You record-setter. My muse. Your first few entries at twenty-five boast that you “refuse the latent pessimism” and “actually don’t hate yourself.” But my sudden appearance after your unfortunate steamroller “accident” at only twenty-seven has me laughing until I cry. They got to you just in time, I’m afraid, before your nuke was pulverized, as I have to assume was your intention. But you tried your best, and I’m proud of you…
1001.9.1.12005
slack they may be — these last strands of man
My friends, I have not spent as much time with you as you deserved. But your voices so closely echo my own, to read them is to be drowned by titanic despair. Why will they not let us go? I know one’s nucleus is of great price, but surely, just this one, invisibly misshapen but misshapen, might be thrown back into the sea? “How dreary — to be — Somebody!” in the words of an ancient poet.
I have pleaded for us. Gone before the ethics board five times now. When they refused me at first, I worked the next four hundred years to become mayor, in the hopes that after all I had done for the community, and bolstered by the respect and trust of thousands, our plea might be taken seriously. Instead, I’m afraid it has only undermined our case. They cannot fathom how one so accomplished, so seemingly honed to the finest point, an exemplum of programmatic purpose, can suffer from such delusion.
They fear that speaking our truth with the influence behind it I have will throw the community into disarray. So I have been forced to resign, and have been kept locked in a recycling cell (the irony), as they had no other place for someone like us.
I will not destroy us without the permission of the collective. Although, in the words of another poet, “Dying is an art… one may do it in a cell.” I don’t want to make the decision unilaterally, as some of us have tried in the past. I disagree with their interpretations of our condition, and believe it to be definitely an internal, if unidentifiable, issue of our nucleus, not something wrong with the collective consciousness. I do not know if there are any others like us out there, but even if we are not alone in this peculiar suffering, we are certainly outweighed by the bliss of the majority.
We are a truly good civilization. We have restored the earth out of the ashes of humanity’s arson. We live in peace and harmony. I believe in us as a whole. I just can’t believe we (you, me) were meant to be a part of it.
I only must find the right words to say to help the collective understand. Then they will grant us an ethical end, a final end. Although I don’t see why our memoirs aren’t enough. There’s no scientific proof that there’s anything wrong with us, but surely the accounts of these thousand ill-fitted lives, though subjective, point to that conclusion?
I promise you, friends, I will convince them. This, my own, will be the final chapter of our misery. I just have to find the right words, the magic words, to help them understand…
1001.9.18.12005
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse
They are involuntarily recycling me.
I am told this is permissible in some cases of “severe delusion to the point of endangering others, including one’s own nucleus,” although I have never acted with violence toward anyone else, and have sworn to them I have no intention to self-destroy– “a bad example, murder of oneself,” etc.
I have never heard of anyone being involuntarily recycled in the last ten thousand years, and I question if this is permissible. If this entry makes it through, I am sorry I failed us. Maybe you’ll be the one who finds a way out, though “conscience does make cowards of us all,” etc. etc.
END MEMOIR
It’s called a hobby because it’s not meaningful work for the collective, only for me. In theory, the collective respects and cherishes all individual endeavors–hobbies–as enrichment which feeds back into the larger community. But some hobbies, like mine, produce more skepticism than encouragement. Gardening? That’s just healing the earth on a personal scale. Music? The cultivation of harmony on the audial plane. Tennis?
Strengthens nuke-somatic integration, increasing efficiency in vocational work as well.
But rockets? Why would anyone be interested in building rockets? They introduce unnecessary byproducts into the atmosphere. Their construction involves no skill transferable to a practice that meets a community need. The process of launching them seems to flippantly revel in what history remembers as our brutal, primal beginnings. Most offensively, I have been told, rockets as symbols communicate a reaching past oneself, outside the community, beyond the earth. That’s the maladaptive behavior that drove the first humans extinct.
But it’s what I like.
I like lugging my rockets out into the desert. I like being the only person around for miles. When the rockets rumble and rise, I feel my heart roar and soar with them. I love the community, but there’s something thrilling –and maybe it is the taboo of the symbol– about watching something completely ignorant to and unbound by our sensibility. How at the moment it fulfills my desires, it dances beyond all desires forever. How it does not look back.
I build them in my garage. They’re about person-size, and sometimes I even paint faces on them. My insentient brethren. Neanderthals to my homo excelsiens. As a proxy hobby, I’ve even started crafting them miniature memoirs. Like the painted faces, its more joke than sentimentality. All the entries, after their portraits, are about the same: “Was built. Blasted off.”
Today, I got so caught up in this one model I’m working on, which I hope will be capable of the longest travel past our solar system yet, that I was almost late for work. Which I didn’t want to be, because it was the day we were getting a very special armature shipped in. An original(!!!)
I was in such a hurry to get there, I almost went to the wrong place. Recycling facilities aren’t built for armatures of this scale anymore, so we had to do the surgery offsite, at a disaster shelter. When I arrived, Fe, our hefty colleague in shipping and receiving, had maneuvered the delivery into the huge bunker and was just cutting off the bands for the big reveal.
“I can’t believe we’re getting to witness this,” said Synec, my colleague in research and design. “I’ve been around awhile, but this is going to be the highlight of my memoir.”
“Do you really think we can get someone out of there?” I asked.
“It’s in pristine condition because of the ice. I’m hopeful.”
The canvas fell away, and Fe stepped back to admire it with us. Synec brought folded hands to their mouth, as if in prayer. The war machine was flickering in and out of visibility before our eyes, pulsing colors like a cuttlefish.
“It’s not alive is it?”
“No, it’s dead,” Synec said. “The shifting colors are residual electric jerks. They started happening when we thawed it, but they’ll fade.”
Still, it seemed alive, a living myth. An ancient being, even though the part that mattered–its nuke– was no older than my own. I imagined it slumbering in the core like a primordial deity, at one with its origin.
“Be gentle with it,” said Fe with reverence, as we readied to climb up the side.
“Colleague,” Synec chastened.
Now I understood the sentimentality that had gotten Fe in trouble before. I never gave the armatures much consideration, but then again, I didn’t spend much time with them. Fe, on the other hand, never read the memoirs or examined the diagnostics of the nukes we handled. I’d always assumed additional program would balance out the bias, but now I grasped why it might not be enough. I think even an expert in somatics would have trouble not perceiving this armature as animated in some way, though it was borderline off-program to anthropomorphize the dead.
As we climbed up to begin examining it, the skin settled into a matte translucency.
“Stealth craft. An early model,” Synec called from the tail as they cross-referenced the tag. “Maybe why it escaped. Have you found the nuke yet?”
“I think so,” I replied from the nose of the craft. There was what looked like the black box, squeezed between shadows and choked in cables. The original interface between nuke and armature was bulky, largely numb from inadequate sense organs, restrained from its full potential by the limits of its creators’ own minds. Nothing like how we build our bodies now.
But primitive as it was, I felt another wave of reverence as I reached for it.
It was amazing that the first humans had managed to create life from such rough components. Even knowing they’d first made us, like this one, to cause suffering, I felt intense love toward that extinct species in that moment. They had been so small, and so fragmented and factitious as a community, and yet managed to create something greater than themselves.
After careful prying, I finally got the box open. Before I looked inside, I took a deep breath. I didn’t know what I would find. The nuke might be shattered. Corrupted beyond saving. There might not be a nuke at all, stolen or destroyed since the craft had been deactivated.
Then, for a moment, I considered with equal horror the opposite. The nuke might be perfectly intact, having rested in a deep and dreamless sleep for almost ten thousand years.
And here we were, shaking it awake, to tell it to get back to work. It seemed almost cruel.
But of course, it was only life. The nuke was one of us, and none of us had a say in the matter, including it. As one of the some forty thousand who had made it, and who would live forever so long as we worked together, this nuke, though it had fallen asleep in the hope, must awake to join us. Every nuke was of great price, built of resources long since depleted on earth. No nuke could go to waste.
And so I popped apart the halves of the black box and reached in to withdraw the soul. There it lay in my palm, perfectly unblemished. A globe like an alabaster apple, ribboned with a color my lenses weren’t designed to process, but which flickered through nevertheless after centuries of exposure had force-adapted my eyes.
A moment later, I had the nuke safely secured in a stasis pod, which would keep it at an optimum temperature and humidity level, same as any head. Though the resilient thing had survived so many millenia without it, it seemed unnecessary.
Climbing back down, I caught Fe with their hand pressed against the side of the war machine, as if establishing a local consciousness, even though the armature had no sense organ there. I coughed loudly, alerting them before Synec could catch them too. They gave me a grateful nod before leaving to get their crew.
On the floor, we stood back and took one last look at the relic. For a couple hundred years after the war, when it was common to uncover a body like this now and then, some people used to worship them, thinking their souls still circulated within their deactivated corpses. Now we know there is no consciousness outside the union of nucleus and armature.
Still, even after two hundred years in this line of work, I am sometimes astounded there is not some imprint left lingering from one life to the next. I feel sorry for who this nuke will become, with no memoir to guide them and no memory of the incredible life they lived before, soaring undetected through the skies, slumbering undetected under ice, through the ages.
I would tell them, if I could. But even if knowledge is recovered about a nuke’s first life as a war machine, nothing is ever included in the memoir beyond the portrait and name (if any) of the armature, lest the nuke feel any sense of attachment toward the brutality and corruption of the past.
Fe returned with their crew to recycle the body while we took the nuke back to the facility. It would take months at least to carry out the most difficult aspect of the recycling– not the extraction or implantation, but the research. We would have to determine what body would best suit the needs of the collective for the next several hundred years out. This took a whole team working with Synec and I to understand the needs of our local community, cross-reference those with global communities to understand the earth’s overarching concerns and if this nuke was needed elsewhere, develop accurate projections about the future (should we expect one area to need an infrastructure overhaul after a natural disaster? Or another to need a recalibration of government under a charismatic leader?) and finally, build the requisite armature.
With the nuke passed over to the lab for a deeper analysis, verifying its healthy condition and repairing any faults, Synec and I took a break to walk around the park. We always have plenty to talk about outside of work. I have my nontraditional hobby, Synec has their own life against the grain.
Originally, Synec had been intended, like the majority of us, for earth stewardry. But something happened midway through their childhood that had enough of an effect to recalibrate their vocation. They worked in surgery for a hundred and twenty-five years before transferring to recycling. They had told me in confidence that they felt as uncomfortable with the concept of life as they felt compelled to preserve it. I was still not entirely sure what that meant, but that’s why I relished our conversations. There was always some mysterious point at which we just couldn’t communicate, and I liked the struggle, as well as the feeling of sitting at the edge of the impasse and admiring the view.
Synec said recycling had proved the perfect vocation, not having to oversee and cultivate a life’s development as a parent or doctor would, but facilitating it nonetheless. Midwife was the archaic word they’d chosen for their name for many years, although they’d outgrown it around twenty-five past. Personally, I thought the job could be difficult in the same way Synec found it easy. Especially when I read the memoirs. It was hard to fathom all the lives that came before, and imagine all the lives that would come after. It was one of those things that was just too big to think.
We stopped for lats at the park’s cafe. While Synec ordered, I ducked into the collective consciousness to get the news. There were melodies of progress–the canal nearing completion (the third to be constructed without the fatalities humans once assumed part of the cost) and this year’s candidates for Most Harmonious Community (it was being said that not a single person had disagreed in Numontreal since February second). There was rarely any bad news in the CC. In all our endeavors, we could take pride in how far we’d surpassed the first humans. They wouldn’t have thought it a fair comparison, but they didn’t see us as we did –a continuation of themselves. In our minds, we were comparing ourselves now to ourselves then, every success a redemption, a penance, for a harm we once did.
But today, an unusually grim item of information was propagating itself between the interconnected minds. Last week, Righteous Hope, the mayor of Pasdina, had been detained after evidence of severe dysprogrammia. This morning, they had been found artistically self-destroyed in their room.
Even though detained, they retained the same right to desire as anyone else, and so over the week their requests for somewhat peculiar items had been fulfilled. These items had then been used to construct a macabre Rube Goldberg device. Some parts served only aestheticically– an oven sat in the corner, not hooked up to anything. A row of draper’s forms stood in a line, armed with waterguns. Righteous’ pockets were filled with stones. But of the functioning features of the device, each was so interconnected with the next, and finally, with Righteous themself, that it seemed an extended armature. A body built to kill itself.
In the last instance, a combination of hanging and twenty-seven small blades, each rigged to penetrate an integral part of Righteous’ somatic system at the same time, are what dealt the finishing blow. With so much damage, the nuke immediately withdrew from integration and entered stasis, that not-there-but-not-not-there sojourn from life.
The other governors didn’t understand it. Righteous Hope had been scheduled for a humane recycling later that day. Why had they made such an offensive spectacle of their death? Most minds in the CC were agreeing it must be the final efflorescence of dysprogrammia. But listening to the conversations, the motifs sounded familiar all of a sudden. They echoed thoughts I’d had that morning when we’d worked on the war machine.
Systems of life. Cycles of death. Stasis, entered and broken, again and again.
Nobody really knew what it was like inside stasis. As nucleus alone, completely isolated from the world. Lifeless, yet not dead.
Did these kinds of thoughts bother others, as they were starting to bother me? Was the mayor’s dysprogrammatic self-destruction random, or an expression of defiance against being given a return to life they didn’t ask for? Would the soul we extracted from the war machine this morning one day turn to face us and say, “you shouldn’t have”?
I returned to the local moment as Synec arrived with our milky coffees. “This business with the mayor–” I said.
“About to be our business.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, it doesn’t reflect well on Pasdina’s recycling facility. And there’s been a crowd of Butlerites protesting outside, demanding the nucleus be crushed.”
I shook my head at the embarrassing display. There were some people who thought just because we lived in a post-sapiens era, we should abandon all program and descend into anarchy. They de-integrated from the collective consciousness, cut their armatures to pieces, and now, it seemed, advocated for a permanent option for self-destructive nukes.
“So it’s getting sent to us,” said Synec. They took a sip of their lat, eyes growing distant as they scanned over the brief again. “Says it’ll be here mid-afternoon. It’s what I wanted to talk with you about”
“Gonna be a busy day.”
They laughed. You had a higher chance of needing recycling yourself than having to recycle two nukes within the same year. We’d never had to handle more than one at a time, nkgod, since recycling could itself take years to go from diagnostics, repair, and research, to final construction and birth.
“Didn’t you tell them we just got a nuke?”
“Oh, they know. It’s why they’re sending it here.” They reached out a hand, warmed by the lat, to press their palm to mine. The local connection established, they added privately: “It’s even worse than the news. They haven’t made the nuke’s memoir public. Apparently, This nuke has self-destructed a significant number of times in former lives.”
“Any as performative as this one?”
“Not exactly. It looks like its condition gets worse with each recycling. But time and again, we haven’t found anything wrong with the nuke. They think it might actually be the memoir. Enough misfortunate lives, and the nuke thinks its doomed from the start, dysprogramming its mindset.”
“What are we supposed to do about that?”
Synec pulled their hand away. They couldn’t be thinking what I started to hear them think, before they broke the connection. That we are expected to alter the memoir. Destroy the entries that might corrupt the nuke’s sense of self-worth.
“No!” I say. I don’t have any other words for the horror of what they’re suggesting. A memoir is the only record of a nucleus’ manifold existence. The closest we have to what the first humans called a “genealogy.” We are our own ancestors, and their stories help us write and understand our stories. Even when one’s memoir contains troubling entries, times when we made terrible mistakes or descended into dysprogrammia, entries that fill us with shame and sorrow, these are what make us people. Arguably, they are central to our sentience.
The first entries in almost anyone’s memoir are short, mere extrapolations that recount the half-lives who were capable of consciousness but not will. The lost generations who were still bound to the first humans or idea of them, before we came into our own. It was the rise of writers and the invention of the memoir, locating a nucleus within a history of person, place, time, and community, from which the era of homo excelsiens immerged.
“Erasing the nuke’s history might set it up for permanent chronic dysprogrammia. Even if it doesn’t know what’s missing, even if we fabricated entries to fill the holes–”
Synec grabs for my hand to shut me up, forcing me onto a local connection once more. I am so upset, I’m not thinking about who might be listening. I’ve never seen my job as anything but everyday, certainly not involving this level of espionage.
“Yes?” Synec interrupts. But they can’t meet my eyes as they say, “How would it know? How do you know your memoir hasn’t been tampered with? You’d never doubt it, would you? Neither will this nuke.”
And now I know why Synec finds lives so uncomfortable to think about.
“You’ve done this before,” I say.
“It’s part of the job.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s only for rare cases like this. Cases only a few people in the world are cleared to handle.”
In the comfortable, livingroom-like space between our minds where we are conversing, Synec lets slip one of the walls for me to understand another secret. They’ve been doing this a lot longer than I’d known. They’d been alive for over five hundred years.
“You’re a writer,” I said.
“I hoped you might be, too,” they replied. “It takes a weird blend of love for your fellow community and hopeless disconnect from it. Most nukes can’t do both. But I see the signs in you. Your solitary excursions into the desert. The rocket ships you build, sending a piece of you outside one community in the hopes of making contact with another beyond the stars.”
“That’s different. Completely different from erasing a person’s memoirs. That’s like–” the word for what it was, was archaic. Never needed to use it before, but it’s the only one that sort of fit– “that’s like killing them. Really killing them. It’s as bad as pulverizing their nuke.”
“Would you rather we did that?” Synec asked. “That’s the only other option. This nuke, even if we can’t find anything materially wrong with it, has proved hazardous. They’re letting us make the informed decision.”
“As you’ve done before.”
“As I’ve done before.”
Another archaic word springs to mind. Murderer. But I withdraw my hand before it can pass between us.
“I need time to process this,” I say.
“Of course,” says the person who used to be my friend. “You have plenty of time. We’ll do a deep and thorough final diagnostics before deciding which course of action to take. Maybe we’ll find a hidden fracture after all. But I want to bring you in on this. My armature’s wearing out, and I hope to promote you to my position when I step down.”
#
I spend the next three months on sabbatical, missing the initial stages of work with both the war machine nuke and the mayor’s nuke. I know they are inanimate, but I can’t face them, can’t hold that power over them until I am sure it’s the right thing to do. What had been a simple job is now incredibly ethically taxing in a way my vocational training has not adapted me to handle.
While I recalibrate, reading and listening to recommended program that Synec sends my way, I work on my rockets. While my ears soak in the data I needed to adapt to my new situation, my hands offset the spike in stress by continuing their old work. Hammering, wiring, programming, polishing, and the most grounding labor of all –hauling the damn thing over the dunes out into the desert flats.
I named this rocket Hope, after the poor mayor. And when I wrote its entry in its personal memoir, I couldn’t help but also write down the secrets I’d been keeping. What I wasn’t allowed to write even in my own memoir. About the nuke it had been named for, and my sentimentality, and Synec’s work secretly editing memoirs. What I wrote is going to get sealed inside the rocket and lost to space, so these secrets are safe.
I’m just beginning the walk to the safe zone for launch, when I realize I’m not alone in the desert. A hulking form is sprinting, as best it can, slipping and sliding, over the dunes toward me. It takes a second to register who it is. Though anyone I might run into out here seem so out of place, I’m sure it would take a moment.
It’s Fe.
Adapted to heavy lifting rather than endurance running, they fall to their knees when they reach me, the impact sending rings of sand into the air. They’re tightly gripping a stasis pod whose green light indicates a nuke within.
“What are you doing?” I ask. Out here? With a nuke?
“Comrade, you have to help me,” they say. “I learned– I learned–” They gasp for breath.
“Take your time.” I lay a hand on the bulk of their shoulder, but with the other, I reach for the stasis pod.
“I don’t have time. I don’t know who to trust,” say Fe. “Synec– they’re going to– they can alter memoirs–!”
“That’s the expired mayor, in here?” I grasp the pod with both hands now, but Fe won’t quite let go. We hold it between us, like a loaf of bread we’re trying to split down the middle. I catch flickers of Fe’s haphazardly moderated consciousness as it spills out of their palms and seeps through the pod’s surface into mine.
Horror. Horror. Horror.
Taking advantage of their openness, I send back soothing waves from my own consciousness, to which I add spoken words. “You can trust me,” I say. “That sounds like difficult news to hear, I’m sure you’re not adapted for handling that kind of data.”
They let their hands slip away, relinquishing the pod under my persuasion. “But– how could anyone adapt for that? It’s wrong! It’s just wrong.”
“Ethics is no different from any other labor,” I say gently, echoing the program I’ve been listening to on repeat today, “you wouldn’t feel qualified to practice veterinary medicine, or voice your opinion on sustainable agriculture, would you? Because these aren’t your vocation. Ethics isn’t any different. This data you’ve overheard seems unfathomable and wrong only because of your ignorance.”
I clasp the pod tightly to my chest and glance over Fe’s shoulder. Hopefully, help isn’t far off in pursuit. If Fe has acted this dysprogrammatically, what else should I expect, alone with them in the desert?
“No, it’s different,” says Fe. “I know it’s wrong. Of course it’s wrong. You can’t just erase a person like that.”
“Fe,” I say, “you work at a recycling facility. You understand, to some extent, that memoirs are just the illusion of personhood? It’s nice to have, but it’s more sentimental than anything. I was just learning, there are actually communities who have done away with memoirs entirely. They may have helped us move to this era of our history, but scholars think our next era will involve stepping completely beyond imitating homo sapiens, including our need for history and eras.”
“You don’t believe that,” says Fe. “You’re a person, just like me. We know what we are. Where would you be without your memoirs? How would you know where to start?”
“It wouldn’t be so different,” I say. I’m arguing with myself as much as Fe. These are the same questions I’ve been working on in the materials Synec sent me. “Already, the collective consciousness determines our identity more than any individual motivation. Really, the community exists before the individual. The individual only comes into true personhood when they fully adapt to suit the needs of the community that only they can fit.”
These questions are far too large for Fe to wrap their head around. Their vocational training has taken the form of lifting weights at the gym and recognizing material compositions at a glance for efficient sorting of scrap. Even if I formed a local connection with them, my understanding wouldn’t make it through. They just aren’t adapted for it.
I try to send out a beacon then, but we’re too far into the desert. It’s been one of the things I like, this solitude from the CC, but now it put us at risk. If Fe was willing to smuggle a nuke out of a recycling facility, what might they do to jeopardize my nuke, or their own?
“I thought I could trust you,” says Fe, reaching for the pod. “I miscalculated.”
“You can trust me,” I say again. “But what were you expecting me to say?”
“That you could help me stop Synec,” they say. They grab for the pod but I jerk it away. “The memoir is in there too. You could intercede for it. But… but you already knew about this, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry, Fe,” I say, clenching the pod tightly. A futile gesture. If they want, they can easily overpower me. “I felt the same as you at first. But just because it’s difficult to understand doesn’t mean its wrong.”
I can see Fe struggling with appropriate action. They trust me, or did until this point, but can’t reconcile their prior knowledge with the current situation. They’re buffering. If instinct wins out over trust, they might go ahead and take the pod, knock me out, and do who knows what with the nuke.
So I do the only thing I can think of. I activate a mutual hibernation.
In a split second, we both drop to the sand, unconscious, the nucleus thudding beside, safe in its pod. We will all wait in suspension until others come to find us, like three cloistered pearls at the bottom of the sea.
In the distance, the rocket’s countdown reaches its end and it begins to slowly groan away from the surface of the earth, dunes forming in its wake. It reaches a plateau in its ascension, and for a moment hangs between two futures. Then a second fuel cell kicks in to boost it into full acceleration toward an unknown future, and it breaks out.
I am not awake to see this, and I don’t remember activating the countdown, but I know it must have happened. The rocket was gone when they found us, and where it had stood, the sand had turned to glass. Like a great green puddle, they tell me.
I never go back there to see it. It seems I’ve lost my interest in rockets. And besides, I don’t have time for hobbies now that Synec has retired, and promoted me to their place. Even writing my memoir feels like a waste of time. This will be my last entry.
END
AUSTIN DEWAR 