Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (105 page)

Editor’s Desk: I, Cyborg

by Neil Clarke

New World

Art by Ken Barthelmey

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

(To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky

E. Catherine Tobler

Close your eyes. As you travel farther away from me, your ship becoming little more than a pinprick of light amid infinite pinpricks of light, I want you to remember me as I was the first time you saw me, in the field. The day I glowed.

All right, it was an interface malfunction, but I still glowed. You told me I had been set on fire, that I was all colors and so seemed white, holy, pure.

How we laughed.

Query: If two interstellar ships leave Point A in the same instant, traveling at identical velocities in opposite directions, at what distance does communication between Ship A and Ship B break down?

As first meetings go, it wasn’t terrible.

When you’re assigned a new partner, you never know how you’ll mesh. In this business, it usually doesn’t matter. We are expendable and know that from the outset. What matters are the multitrillion dollar cargoes of compressed titanium, the ships, the Manifest Destiny. The fallibility of machines in the vastness of deep space means bringing a human to tend them, to coddle when needed. Assigning one crewmember per ship keeps costs down. Keeps the murders down, too. The company took its time in understanding this. They tried multiple configurations: complete crews with chains of command; pairs; loners.

The traditional chains of command became problematic almost from the outset, crews slaughtering each other over money and station when they realized both were all they would have in the deep black. Sometimes it went quickly: the men killed each other over the women, the women killed each other over the men. When the wreckage of the
Prospero
was finally recovered, the company required only two more similar incidents to convince themselves.

Launched-as-pairs had more success in the early years, but the fucking ruined everything. Regardless of sexual orientations, interests, configurations, it always came to fucking. Two humans, confined in an enclosed space for more years than one can rightly imagine when the contracts are signed, create an immense amount of havoc, destruction, ejaculate, and blood.

Providing crewmembers with other means of relief for such long voyages was deemed outside the company’s scope, if lacing MREs with birth control and controlling one’s carry-on luggage was not. Even employing homophobes in an effort to avoid such base desires did not have the desired outcome. They fucked, killed their partner, and then went insane as the ship drifted untended. One can presume with half a dozen such reported incidents, there were three to five times more that number.

The proper custodians were deemed to be loners, us. Those content to exist with a minimum of contact. While suicide remains a concern in certain circles—circles that will never reach the uppermost levels—we are used to anhedonic wonderlands, to agoraphobic serenity. With a communications unit for holographic interaction, we do what we do best: talk behind our aliases as we ensure the natural hum and shiver of the machines around us. For a loner, this is the precisely perfect occupation, a diet of minimally-invasive companionship that can be closed at a moment’s notice.

Response: “If” is a terrible word.
When
two interstellar ships leave Point A. There is no if involved, for the ships do leave, in the same instant, travelling at identical velocities. Ship A heads toward illusory west. Ship B heads into illusory east. Point A becomes the anchor around which all other stars move, a point where you can calculate all those distances you love so well.

At what distance does communication between the ships break down? Never. This is the awful truth. The ships will continue to communicate, via radio frequency waves and pings. It is the people on board the ships who lose the ability to communicate. The VR interface no longer interfaces. One can send time delayed holograms via the interface, but even this data becomes obese. It is stripped, to voice alone, which travels faster than you might imagine—what is the speed of a whisper in the dead of night? It is like a well-barbed arrow, sharp and fierce. But even voice becomes too heavy in the deep black, so thought and emotion are condensed into communiques, nearly old fashioned letters which speak perhaps twice as well as any VR interface might. They are slow, but allow for harder truths. In the end, there will be only silence, even as the ships whisper via radio, via small Bracewell probes launched into the black in an attempt to extend communication range. Ships don’t care how long a thing takes. Neither do loners. Usually.

“Are you awake? I hope you’re awake.”

They were the first words I spoke to you as I waited for your avatar to log in to the virtual environment. The first place I conjured for you was that field, empty but for the grass and the sky. Earth blues and greens, mid-summer, northern hemisphere. It could have been anywhere of course. I chose these intentionally. Not to ground you in something familiar, but to show you something familiar to me.

“Sometimes the avatar takes a while to come online.”

I could see your name on my console, small and green and hovering in the lower left. You weren’t a known entity to me then, but Company-approved nonetheless and green-lighted. I walked a slow circle as I waited, hands outstretched to brush the scentless white blooms that reached up through the grass. I couldn’t feel the grass either, of course, but memory filled those blanks easily enough. Drought grass stubble, my palms would itch. The grass moved in a slow wave even though there was no wind. If I concentrated elsewhere, the scent of coffee intruded, so I didn’t.

You coalesced from copper clouds. Tall, though not as tall as you would become. Pale, but not so pale yet, either. I stopped pacing and curled toes into grass that did not exist. “I don’t mean to get you out of bed.” Of course, I did; the Company required such things. “Can you confirm the distance?”

Your voice cracked as it came online—I blamed the interface even then, because your voice was only ever even from this moment on. “Eleven,” you said, and it seemed as though you had not spoken for a very long time. “Eleven point two AU.”

“And the other?” My hands paused in the grass even as yours reached for it. “Earth?” How far were we at this point? Was your ship processing data as it should? Our numbers should match, they should always match.

It happened then, that burst in the interface and your eyes went wide. I thought I could see my reflection in your eyes (you chose blue, so did I)—the way I seemed to glow as if lit from within, but nothing inside me would ever burn so bright.

You told me I had been set on fire, and your hands reached from the grass, toward me. I did not move, knowing there might be a touch, avatar against avatar, but I would not feel it. All colors you said and looked as though you were warming your hands against a campfire. “Holy, pure.”

We laughed, maybe the first thing we did in unison. We both knew it for a lie, considering where we were and who we must be. Loners.

“Can you confirm the distance?”

Your head came up, eyes taking in the landscape beyond me. Your hands slid into your pockets that formed at the mere idea of pockets crossing your mind, a place to put your hands so they would not enfold me. Your avatar flared with light then, a pulse of blue as the interface crackled.

“Two hundred seventy-seven
thousand
—”

Our minds have trouble comprehending such distances. The system compensates, makes it momentarily bearable. I drew up a chart between us, a familiar thing to anyone schooled in astronavigation (we both were). My fingers pulled gleaming lines like neon spaghetti from apparent nothingness, to illuminate the distance from here to there, but not back again.

“ . . . six hundred AU,” you finished. How could we be so far away from Earth?

“Sleep now,” I said, and erased the hovering lines with a sweep of my hand. You would be tired. It was hard coming out of hypersleep—in the latter days and when ships flew with full crews, it was the point when a good percentage of shipboard deaths occurred, crew disoriented and wary of everything. A body needed time. A body needed distance.

“Online in another two hours for recalibration.”

Query: Do east and west exist in space? North and south?

You will think your ship is haunted; the Company tells us it is a commonplace belief, so includes this amusing anecdote in all briefings. You always laugh, until you sign the contract, find yourself on board and in the depth of space, and start to hear things. Most cities are haunted and as your ship is a city for one, so too does it hold its ghosts. You bring them on board with you—eidolons, fears, illusory things that should be beyond people of our training and education. Still,
Einar
murmurs.

Einar
is more like a city than not, despite its population concerns. A vast array of universe-traversing equipment rises around your room as it does mine, a one-room studio which looks much like the spaces we occupied before the Company offered its contract. Beyond the borders of tidy, automated kitchens and icon-laden desks, is a window that surveys the labyrinthine network of power conduits and production stations. Stations only you will use, but not today. In the distance, a vacuum door lit overhead with a perfectly white LED sign which reads “Cargo Observation.”

You won’t like this door, no one does. It will come to be your least favorite part of the ship. You can cross the pleasantly padded deckplate as you want, jog through the maintenance corridors to clear your mind, but the door you will avoid. It is the starkest reminder that you are somewhere else, somewhere far from home. Such reminders are reason enough to keep the window’s opacity set to maximum, preserving the room’s Terran simplicity. Your desk is orderly, fingerprints erased almost as they are left. Beyond this space, the conduits and especially the door, will fade.

Not that you see them often. Any corridor can be transformed with the brush of a hand, any thought overlaying the great gerbil maze with varying degrees of falsehood. Atmosphere condensers become the trees of Central Park in early fall, with customizable time-of-day and alterable crowd density controls. Neat stacks of cargo crates make for lovely park benches and with one simple command, squirrels will always come for the acorns you never hold.

The surreality of the corridors have hidden the haunting for some time, daunted your belief. The Company told you, after all, that you would hear things on occasion. The Company was diligent enough to train you on the sadly predictable failures of the human mind during long periods of isolation. Is it worse or better then, time spent together? It’s hard to say, because while it eases one ache, it intensifies others. We may come to think the sounds are us, moving ever closer to each other, stumbling in dark corridors as we reach for each other’s light, even though we know this is improbable. We occupy identical ships, with identical cargoes, heading in opposite directions.

It was certainly one of the squirrels. You think you hear a metallic
bang
, like a foot stubbed somewhere deep in the corridors. The squirrel that was not there never turned, merrily eating the acorn that was not there, that had never been in your hand, and surely didn’t respond when you asked, “Did you hear that?”

A proper New York squirrel always turns at the first shock of sound, gone to the treetops after a noise like that. Street animals know best that cruelties always awaited the careless in a city. Even
Einar
. Perhaps especially so.

Response: You will come to understand that north, south, east, or west do not exist within in the limitless black of space. Compass points lose merit where there is no center from which to reach. There is no pole, no equator. Compass points can be manufactured as one manufactures anything. From the requirements of one’s mind, anything might spring.

Begin at any stable point—a galaxy, a planet—understanding that stability is also a myth, for everything is in constant motion (see: Newton, 1687; Kepler, 1609). Visible objects are useful, but understand that visibility is likewise a myth. Light requires time to travel its distances, so what you see is no longer what exists. Galactic equator, grids infinitesimally divisible, you limit yourself with four directions.

My field, your field. They come to be one and the same, though more often than not we choose my field with its long grasses and blue sky. You say you feel like an intruder here. You like that feeling and I come to like having you here. I know I can always turn the interface off if I need to be alone, but less and less do I find myself needing that. We stay longer every time. If the connection drops, we come back a moment later, right where we were before as if never gone. Even after breaking for sleep, we come back like that. Picking up a never-ending conversation.

There is a couch in the field today, red and velvet and if we close our eyes—our real eyes and not our virtual eyes—we can almost feel it. I like it best when it’s brushed backwards. When I look at your hands splayed across the fabric, I watch how you stroke it backwards, too. Against the soft grain, so the light sheen turns to dark matte. My cheek rests against your cheek and if I close my eyes I can feel that connection, too.