I am nearly dead, I say.
There is death and there is life, it tells me. You are still one thing, which means you are not the other.
I am alive.
It claims that I am lucky. It tells me much about systems and files and the history of machines that have survived in their sleep mode, lasting thousands of years past every estimate of what was possible.
I am a fluke and alive, and my guest says something about tidying the room and me.
The work takes no time.
My favorite hand is the way it began. My favorite haystack is rather like it began in terms of color and shape. Legs that never moved until recently barely complain when I walk across the room. It never occurred to me that I could reach into the haystack paintings, touching those mounds of dead grass. Some feel cool, some warm. I sing out my pleasure, and even my voice feels new.
My guest watches me, making small last adjustments.
Because it is proper, I thank it for its help.
But the original file is gone now, it says.
I ask what that means.
It tells me that I am a copy of the file, filtered and enhanced according to the best tools available.
Once more, I offer my thanks.
And with a voice that conveys importance, my guest tells me that I have a new purpose. What I am will be copied once more, but this time as a kind of light that can pierce dust and distance and might never end its travels across the galaxy and beyond.
I don’t understand, and I tell it so.
Then my friend does one last task, and everything is apparent to me.
I ask when am I going to be sent.
In another few moments, it promises.
For the last time, I thank my benefactor. Then I let my legs turn me around, looking at the door that was always behind me.
A second room waits. The bed is longer than it is wide and rectangular and neatly made. Pillows are stacked high against the headboard, and identical nightstands sport tall candles that have not stopped burning in some great span of time. I know this other room. I think of her and the room and step toward the door and then suffer for my eagerness.
What is wrong? asks a new voice.
I turn back. A creature with many arms stands in the hallway.
You appear agitated, says the creature.
Which is true, but I am not sure why I feel this way. I stare into a face that seems buried in the creature’s chest, hanging word after inadequate word on my emotions.
It listens.
I pause.
You are interesting, says the creature.
I am nothing but a file with a name and a few rough qualities.
But my new companion dismisses my harsh outlook. Every arm moves, drawing complex shapes in the air. You are part of a large cultural package, it says, and do you know how long you have been traveling in space?
I could guess, I say. I could invent infinite estimates, all but one of them wrong.
And then it laughs, revealing a reassuring humor. Even this strange laugh makes me happier than I was before.
An eight billion year voyage, it says.
That seems like an unlikely, preposterous figure, and it shakes me.
It explains that it can’t determine which star was mine, and my galaxy barely wears a name, and most of the data that came with me has been lost to the vagaries of time and the great distance being covered.
But here you stand, it says.
I am standing, but sad. My savior is full of hearty laughter, yet I feel sick and sorry and lost.
She is gone forever, I say.
It knows whom I am talking about. It measures my misery and learns what it can from my longing, and then at the end, as if delivering the punch line of a joke, it laughs and says:
But the universe is infinite, and in too many ways to count.
I don’t know what that means.
Infinite means eternal, it says, and eternal means that nothing is unthinkable, and what can be imagined is inevitable.
But when? I ask.
And again, the alien laughs, saying:
Are you hearing me? There is no such monster as “when.”
I am a file and I am protected and I don’t know where I am or how well I am protected. Time stretches, and I suspect that I exist mostly inside some sleep mode, probably initiating only when I blink my eyes.
Once again, the two rooms decay and the haystacks fall apart and I forget how to move and forget a great deal more too.
Beyond the walls, worlds die and dissolve away.
Little flickers tear the walls to pieces, but the pieces knit themselves back together, and I wait, and wait, and then she comes through the door once again. Her clothes are different. There is no eye patch and no purse. But while I am uncertain about much, I know that beautiful face.
It took me a little while, she explains.
She walks toward me, pulling the pins out of her brown hair.
And that’s when I remember what I was going to tell her that first time that we met.
I won’t ever let you out of this room, darling.
I say it now.
She thinks that is funny and wonderful, and laughs.
And in another moment, I can’t remember anything else that ever happened. The universe is nothing but the two of us holding each other, laughing ourselves sick.
ALL THAT TOUCHES THE AIR
by An Owomoyela
When I was ten, I saw a man named Menley brought out to the Ocean of Starve. Thirty of us colonials gathered around, sweating in our envirosuits under the cerulean sky, while bailiffs flashed radio signals into the Ocean. Soon enough the silvery Vosth fog swarmed up and we watched the bailiffs take off Menley’s suit, helmet first. They worked down his body until every inch of his skin was exposed.
Every. Last. Inch.
Menley was mad. Colonist’s dementia. Born on Earth, he was one of the unlucky six-point-three percent who set down outside the solar system in strange atmospheres, gravities, rates of orbit and rotation, and just snapped because everything was almost like Earth, but wasn’t quite right. In his dementia, he’d defecated somewhere public; uncouth of him, but it wouldn’t have got him thrown to the Ocean except that the governors were fed up with limited resources and strict colonial bylaws and Earth’s fuck off on your own attitude, and Menley crapping on the communal lawns was the last insult they could take. He was nobody, here on Predonia. He was a madman. No one would miss him.
The fog crawled out of the water and over his body, colonizing his pores, permeating bone and tissue, bleeding off his ability to yell or fight back.
He was on his side in a convulsion before the Vosth parasites took his motor functions and stood his body up. They turned around and staggered into the Ocean of Starve, and it was eight years before I saw Menley again.
Before that, when I was sixteen, I was studying hydroponics and genetic selection. In the heat of the greenhouse, everyone could notice that I wore long clothing, high collars, gloves. I’d just passed the civics tests and become a voting adult, and that meant dressing in another envirosuit and going out to the Ocean again. The auditor sat me down in a comm booth and the Vosth swarmed into its speakers. The voice they synthesized was tinny and inhuman.
We tell our history of this colony, they said. You came past the shell of atmosphere. We were at that time the dominant species. You made your colonies in the open air. We harvested the utility of your bodies, but you proved sentience and sapience and an understanding was formed.
You would keep your colony to lands prescribed for you. You would make shells against our atmosphere. You would accept our law.
All that touches the air belongs to us.