This was important work, but it wasn’t fun work.
Exhausted and bored, this 31-1 felt like a different creature than before. The alien faces had stopped being new. His mind kept returning to an eternal, left-behind World. The genuine sun was pinned to the perfect salmon sky, a fine dry wind blowing from wastelands. Airborne salts gave the wind its flavor, and friends were standing with him. Voices that would never escape him kept offering their advice and their scorn. What was he doing? Leaving the World was insane. That was without question, and they said so and said so and said it again.
The 31-1 felt as if he had stopped using his eyes. Only his perfect mind mattered, and a very long existence lay under him, straddled and complacent.
But he was wrong. The face that he wanted had appeared inside this reality. Existence returned to this tiny place and one promise. The 31-1 passed through the next sequence of realities. Sometimes he felt the illusion of walking, but not now. He was motionless as the Great Ship gracefully shifted its position around him, leading him towards an existence where two strangers would collide on this busy, shell-paved avenue.
What would be said?
Humans managed conversation easily, but only because they were oblivious to how impossible conversation was. Countless words, endless poses, and each reality offering crushing ramifications. The 31-1 had gathered up several viable strategies. Instead of offering the truth, he would befriend this stranger with typical words, or maybe he would beg for small favors or large sums of money. Unless he offered nothing but his close, unwelcome presence as the human continued his migration through realities. That would put the burden of the first word on human shoulders, and that solution might be best.
But the most likely strategy was to grab the man with one of his five hands, shaking him while saying, “The man you want is ready to die for his crimes.”
Life was fixed and eternal. 31-1s understood that, just as they knew how the obliteration of a body and mind could never erase a life’s existence.
Yet this 31-1 felt nervous. Which was very uncharacteristic of his kind. He was so nervous that his great eyes were focused on the pretty shells beneath his five bare feet. He didn’t see the human standing before him. The stranger was waiting to be run over, or he was just waiting. Like Ash, he was a brown creature with a slight build. But he was far more handsome, at least by human measures. And instead of black-blue, his eyes were brown rimmed with a fine snowy whiteness.
“What are you?” the human asked.
Was any question more difficult than that?
Before the universe offered answers, the human added, “You’re a 31-1. I’ve heard about you.”
It was a pleasure, recognizing interest in the voice.
Yet the 31-1 decided to do nothing for as many futures as possible. That meant standing in the open, feeling the false light of a five hour day closing into darkness. Feeling even more than nervous now. This human wanted to kill his friend, and a succession of realities left him wracked with terror.
To this vengeful stranger, the 31-1 said, “I’m busy. I must leave.”
“Ah. By any chance, do you live nearby?”
“Yes.” Another lie. Which was a skill shared by every 31-1. Since lies were truths in other realms.
“I’ll see you again, perhaps, and we can chat,” the human said.
He was smaller than Ash and sweet-faced. That sweetness wasn’t apparent for another fifty days. By then, the 31-1 had become a little more expert in the expressions and manners of human beings. Ash was a stoic, intensely private creature. But this very pretty human was the opposite of stoic or private. He easily shared details of a long life and the worlds seen, reaching back to his childhood, and then he quietly spoke about his red world and the war that took hold of his homeland, and he described the suffering seen and the suffering experienced firsthand.
The sweet face was weeping.
The lovely mouth opened and said nothing and then closed again. For the first time, the human had no words to offer.
The 31-1 looked at the cold tea on the table between them. And he studied everything else that he had ever experienced.
“Someone is hurting you,” said the timeless creature. “Now and in the past too.”
“Very badly,” the suffering man agreed.
A series of silent realities took hold, not a word spoken.
Then with a thread of mucus leaking from the nostrils, the human produced the holo of the torturer who had done unspeakable things to him.
The universe was a sequence of perfect photographs.
Ash lived inside that image.
“As I understand it,” the man began. Then he paused to breathe, gathering himself before saying, “31-1s have remarkable memories for faces.”
“And for quite a lot more than faces,” his companion agreed.
“You might have seen this face before,” the sweet man suggested.
“I see him now, yes,” said the 31-1.
“Now?” Not understanding, the man twisted his head, looking one way and then another.
“I know where he lives. That’s what I mean.”
“Will you tell me where?”
“No,” said the one who smelled like nothing else in existence. “But I will take you to him. Now.”
The AI whispered.
“The man approaches.”
A warning was delivered.
And Ash understood that this was his last day of life.
Doubt didn’t exist. The premonition smacked him and then left him feeling hopeless, the pain growing blacker and hotter until it was unbearable, until his heart raced and his skin was clammy wet and both hands shook and his legs could barely hold him upright. Three seconds. That’s how long he had to endure the worst of it. Three seconds, which felt like an enormous span. Ash was never more human or more enveloped in time than when one of these awful, inevitable premonitions grabbed up his soul.
Exactly on schedule, the trembling eased. By the ten second mark, his breathing had slowed and his heart remembered that it didn’t have to beat so hard, and rising up on his toes, Ash tested the legs that still missed the sluggish gravity of their home world. The dry wind stole away his sweat. One hand was steadier than the other, and it rubbed the back of its nervous mate while he listened to the wind playing with the bristlecone’s gnarled branches.
“Of course this is my last day,” he thought. “Since I never leave and the sun never sets…”
There. The incident was finished.
Except the voice returned. Once more, the security AI said, “He approaches, and I can’t see all of him.”
The human was obvious, but one of his pockets was shielded. Ash saw the same scans and agreed with the machine. There was enough room inside that pocket for a small but still thoroughly illegal plasma gun. Exactly the kind of tool to use if you wanted to obliterate another man’s bioceramic mind.
Ash walked past the bristlecone, out where flat ground turned into empty air. Two figures were walking together on the narrow glass road. They were far below, several hours away. The 31-1 was leading, but the human didn’t need any help. Ash didn’t have to read minds to know that. The man had an urgent stride and he kept looking up at Ash’s home, and despite knowing it was foolish, the man insisted on occasionally touching the pocket, feeling the gun that would deliver a world of retribution.