Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (22 page)

~~~

ADAM KNIGHT is a writer and an English teacher in northern New Jersey. His work has been accepted at
Brain Soup, Halfway
Down
the Stairs, Golden Visions Magazine
, and
Hall Brothers’ Entertainment’s Villainy
anthology. He can be reached at
[email protected]
.

Building bridges of meaning through symbols — such as flags, status, and nationality — is as much about alienating as connecting. But the Virtual Bridge Sri plans to build could reconnect the lost hopes of a dying civilization.

CONNECT

by
Kenneth Burstall

By any reasonable measure we are dead.

Unity — slow, cold and broken — is leaving me behind. It’s a slowly boiling mass of speckled gray now. I’m walking away from it, building, understanding, memorizing as I go. And to do these things, to tie them together, I use my memories.
Of being alive, of dying, of being dead.

~~~

The centre of the quadrangle was forbidden territory for displaced persons. Sometimes, though, the machine gun crew, drunk on loneliness or alcohol, would let some children in for a while. We would run and scream, ecstatic and terrified by the alien view the soldiers had of our people. A full 360 degrees of crowds on hard plastic seats and primitive bathrooms half-way down each thirty meter side.

We would play king-of-the-castle on the chunks of limestone there, a child on a rock pulled down and replaced by his or her peers.

One strange night the drunken soldiers let us into the central area. We rushed around, scaring each other with screams and unskilled kisses. We played king-of-the-castle, and it was a completely different game in the dark. When those trying to pull the king down were invisible, they were vicious and fast. The game moved at a startling pace, generating bruises and tears by the score.

For a brief moment I was king and the air on that rock seemed cold, thin and clear. The stars were brighter than I’d ever seen, pinholes in the fabric of the sky letting onto a blazing aurora. Then I was pulled down and the soldiers screamed us back to the edges at an officer’s approach.

I was eight years old.

~~~

Why my parents married, let alone adopted me, was a mystery.

“Fuck you! If it weren’t for my money, you’d still be living on EU food parcels.” A stream of obscene Russian followed Mother’s outburst. Father was touchy about his origins in Neutral Scotland.

“And if it weren’t for me, you’d be an uncultured parochial bitch. You may have made a little money but I was the one invested it, so excuse me while I go and spend some.”
With that he stormed out, infuriating Mother even more by beating her to it.

We looked at each other, then at the beautifully inlaid door father had just slammed.

Weirdly, we started throwing numbers at each other, estimates of the effect that veneer would have on the aluminum honeycomb underneath.

I was ten years old.

~~~

The ship is perpetually cold. It slows irreversible processes and conserves energy. Still, with energy not being a problem here, there are other ways to solve the first issue. Our tokomaks have enough fuel to run at full capacity for the full 5000-year trip. We could run warm.

I believe the cold was imposed, unconsciously, as a penance for our deserting a doomed world. All but the fanatics claimed to wish us well, but I think that everyone really hated us.

We were leaving behind a biologically immortal population ten billion strong on top of an ecosystem crashing back to blue-green algae.

We got our last, anguished signal from them 513 years ago.

I am 3124 years old.

~~~

Kids with parents who were live and free were the elite. They got more and better food than the rest of us, live and free parents tending to stay that way by being bullies.

“So where’s your mum and dad today, Smeary?” Tall, blond and, hatefully to me, intelligent Smethills was my main persecutor. “Oh yes.
Losing it in Wales!”

None of us knew what this stuff meant, of course. At eight years old, we simply latched on to whatever hurt the most. The Leary name was well-known, however, even among kids.

Mum and Dad were up in the mountains of the DMZ, shooting at and failing to kill US patrols. The numbers of their fellow insurgents were continually being reduced by packs of augmented dogs, the only weapon the US deigned to use.

Their disdain did not, however, prevent massively disproportionate reprisals against the camp populations for Mum and Dad’s activities.

I ran at Smethills, fists swinging, leaving him bleeding, crying,
running
for his mother.

That night his father and his goons visited. They beat my uncle so badly he pissed blood for a month.

~~~

Mother and Father made up, of course, with plenty of make-up sex. I could hear it through the very strong but very light door to their room.

To distract myself I laid my head on the brass grab-bar that ran all around the room. The distant bass of the big engines suddenly became clearer. More interesting to me was my distorted image in the rich glow of the polished metal: one eye huge, one small, mouth drawn out in a long snarl. I could sense these distortions somehow mapped back to the original me.

As I devised a mathematical framework to express the transformation, I felt a cold happiness at the conclusion. I map continuously back to myself.

~~~

Most crew engineer themselves to ignore the cold.

Some of us endure it, pulling ourselves along the drums dressed in thick furs. We’re regarded as eccentrics of course, among a crew of people selected for eccentricity.

I’m supremely odd for my choice of flag above my cabin door.

On a ship covered in EU, US, Russian, Chinese, Brazilian and other modern national flags, only mine triggers rage, embarrassment or sadness in the viewer, even after all this time. No one has a simple response to that
red cross
on a white background.

~~~

Food was brought on trucks through an armored garage door that took up the middle third of one side of the quadrangle. Through the gap one could see the next, identical quadrangle. There were dozens of the things. Prefabricated carbon fiber squares, each one the same as the others, tiled who knew how many times.

After Uncle Fred was so badly injured, Aunt Mary put in for a transfer to another square. Amazingly her request was granted.

~~~

The giant airship was something mother wished she had designed. That she hadn’t been asked she put down to sexism and racism.

Father put it down, vocally, to her reputation for hugely impressive, hugely disparate projects.

Of the big three projects she’d worked on: one was a domed city on Prometheus, the skyhook anchor; one was a modular space-port in Ulan Bator and one was a chip-fab in Cape Town.

Even in an age that abhorred specialising this was felt to spreading oneself too thin.

The fact that each project was so successful somehow made it worse.

No one so singular could be trusted with a project on the scale of the airship.

~~~

Everyone knows my family connection to the dog and its journey from Snowdonia to Liverpool.

Some find it impossible to talk to me despite the gap in both distance and time.

To hell with them.

The sociologists decided a little encouragement to national feeling would add some seasoning to the crew. They probably were thinking something along the lines of pan-European cuisine accompanied by a tango with Bengali dancing.

Instead they got a bunch of simmering, low-level, ethnicity-based interpersonal conflicts.
Conflicts that lasted millennia without resolution.
If it weren’t for our annual mnemonic adjustments we would have wiped each other out. We’d be zombies with nothing but emotional scars.

~~~

The new quadrangle had a different atmosphere to the last. The central soldiers were stricter — no excursions onto the rockless mud. The kids were sadder, the adults quieter.

I heard Uncle Fred tell Aunt Mary this was a punishment quadrangle. If insurgents shot at US troops, the people here would be decimated — marched into the centre and one in ten would be shot.

No wonder the lieutenant had laughed as he signed our transfer papers.

~~~

“What do you think the chances of success are?”

“Slim to none. The project was put together too hastily. An entire biosphere cannot be treated like building a city.”

“You’re saying they’re being hasty? That’s a wee bit hypocritical coming from you.”

Sensing an argument brewing, I butted in from my seat at the head of the table. “When will the first iceteroid hit?”

“Next year, Hellas Basin.
Pure grandstanding to make people think of it as a first step to an ocean.”

“Did I tell you I got the graphic design contract for the impact visuals? Very high-profile contract,” said Father.

“Well done.
Another worthless parasite on a noble project.”

“Don’t piss me off, woman. Failing to get the contract for this ship doesn’t give you the right to belittle my work.”

I gave up on defusing the argument.

~~~

Really, we are passengers. Our beautiful ship runs
itself
. We can access controls and any damage we cause is instantly fixed by the nano paste that is everywhere on the ship and in our bodies. A twinkling gray the consistency of clay it cleans and, we suspect, calms us. Some think we should use it to slow our bodies down so our journey would seem to be over in months. Some of us, I include myself, have other plans. We’ll have to organise a mutiny to get them built though.

~~~

The rhythm of life in the quadrangles was syncopated, deliberately kept off balance. From the random meal times to the lack of night-time lights we were kept deliberately anxious. The poor food and lack of exercise made us easy to control.

The soldiers became gods to us, angels here to redeem us from our childish mistakes.

A food cart slipped off the walkway as it trundled by, its front wheels stuck in the mud.

“Kid, get your ass over here,” said the corporal pushing the cart.

“Yes sir.” I ran to the cart and helped lift it back onto the path. To be honest, I didn’t do much but the corporal seemed to find my efforts amusing and gave me a handful of sweets.

From then on I was his pet, his helper in small tasks and his spy among the DPs.

~~~

The airship powered slowly back to the Martian skyhook. The High-Celebrity in the skyscraper-on-its-side-sized gondola got bored and returned to their casinos, pools, and circuses. In a structure that size, there was something for everyone.

The management panicked. When the High-Celebrity returned to Earth with tales of crimson monotony, who would buy tickets for the
Jules Verne
?

“They are fools. They don’t understand engineering has emotions. Here, people want destinations. I would have built them. Pleasure domes, haunted mines.
Places for ships to stop and people to experience.”

I looked up at Mother, more fascinated by her than the panoramic view out of the window.

“Space is boring. These dust and ice balls separated by voids are only interesting if we engineer them, bring them closer to us.”

~~~

She was wrong in a way. Space is terrifying when you’re moving through it at 0.15% of the speed of light. Dust motes have the kinetic energy of an oncoming truck and are only dealt with by our large ablation shield of dirty ice.

We would get used to it and it would become boring if we let it, though.

Instead, we all allow a certain background of panic to make sure we keep our collective edge.

Mother was right in a more important way, though. Traversing the void, as we are doing, is not enough. We have to close it, make it a place in its own right.

~~~

The people around the quadrangle observed my favorite status with the soldiers with dull contempt. The children hated me for a traitor without being able to do anything about it. I was untouchable and even my Aunt and Uncle despised me as they ate the extra rations I got them.

The soldiers took to giving me forbidden gifts. Jeans, sneakers, music patches loaded with the latest thrash from Cleveland, the latest hip-hop from El Paso. My family ate better than any other, I had more sweets than I could eat — but no one would share them with me.