Peter Watts: Firefall

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black. Stars, and—

—nothing else.

What did you expect? I chided myself. An alien mothership hanging off the starboard bow?

Well, why not? We were out here for something .

The others were, anyway. They’d be essential no matter where we’d ended up. But my own situation was a bit different, I realized. My usefulness degraded with distance.

And we were over half a light year from home.

WHERE WAS I when the lights came down?

I was emerging from the gates of Heaven, mourning a father who was—to his own mind, at least—still alive.

It had been scarcely two months since Helen had disappeared under the cowl. Two months by our reckoning, at least. From her perspective it could have been a day or a decade; the Virtually Omnipotent set their subjective clocks along with everything else.

She wasn’t coming back. She would only deign to see her husband under conditions that amounted to a slap in the face. He didn’t complain. He visited as often as she would allow: twice a week, then once. Then every two. Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.

On the day the lights came down, I had joined him at my mother’s side. It was a special occasion, the last time we would ever see her in the flesh. For two months her body had lain in state along with five hundred other new ascendants on the ward, open for viewing by the next of kin. The interface was no more real than it would ever be, of course; the body could not talk to us. But at least it was there , its flesh warm, the sheets clean and straight. Helen’s lower face was still visible below the cowl, though eyes and ears were helmeted. We could touch her. My father often did. Perhaps some distant part of her still felt it.

But eventually someone has to close the casket and dispose of the remains. Room must be made for the new arrivals—and so we came to this last day at my mother’s side. Jim took her hand one more time. She would still be available in her world, on her terms, but later this day the body would be packed into storage facilities crowded far too efficiently for flesh and blood visitors. We had been assured that the body would remain intact—the muscles electrically exercised, the body flexed and fed, the corpus kept ready to return to active duty should Heaven experience some inconceivable and catastrophic meltdown. Everything was reversible, we were told. And yet—there were so many who had ascended, and not even the deepest catacombs go on forever. There were rumors of dismemberment, of nonessential body parts hewn away over time according to some optimum-packing algorithm. Perhaps Helen would be a torso this time next year, a disembodied head the year after. Perhaps her chassis would be stripped down to the brain before we’d even left the building, awaiting only that final technological breakthrough that would herald the arrival of the Great Digital Upload.

Rumors, as I say. I personally didn’t know of anyone who’d come back after ascending, but then why would anyone want to? Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed.

Dad might have known for sure—Dad knew more than most people, about the things most people weren’t supposed to know—but he never told tales out of turn. Whatever he knew, he’d obviously decided its disclosure wouldn’t have changed Helen’s mind. That would have been enough for him.

We donned the hoods that served as day passes for the Unwired, and we met my mother in the spartan visiting room she imagined for these visits. She’d built no windows into the world she occupied, no hint of whatever utopian environment she’d constructed for herself. She hadn’t even opted for one of the prefab visiting environments designed to minimize dissonance among visitors. We found ourselves in a featureless beige sphere five meters across. There was nothing in there but her.

Maybe not so far removed from her vision of utopia after all , I thought.

My father smiled. “Helen.”

“Jim.” She was twenty years younger than the thing on the bed, and still she made my skin crawl. “Siri! You came!”

She always used my name. I don’t think she ever called me son .

“You’re still happy here?” my father asked.

“Wonderful. I do wish you could join us.”

Jim smiled. “Someone has to keep the lights on.”

“Now you know this isn’t goodbye,” she said. “You can visit whenever you like.”

“Only if you do something about the scenery.” Not just a joke, but a lie; Jim would have come at her call even if the gauntlet involved bare feet and broken glass.

“And Chelsea, too,” Helen continued. “It would be so nice to finally meet her after all this time.”

“Chelsea’s gone , Helen,” I said.

“Oh yes but I know you stay in touch. I know she was special to you. Just because you’re not together any more doesn’t mean she can’t—”

“ You know she —”

A startling possibility stopped me in mid-sentence: maybe I hadn’t actually told them.

“Son,” Jim said quietly. “Maybe you could give us a moment.”

I would have given them a fucking lifetime. I unplugged myself back to the ward, looked from the corpse on the bed to my blind and catatonic father in his couch, murmuring sweet nothings into the datastream. Let them perform for each other. Let them formalize and finalize their so-called relationship in whatever way they saw fit. Maybe, just once, they could even bring themselves to be honest, there in that other world where everything else was a lie. Maybe.

I felt no desire to bear witness either way.

But of course I had to go back in for my own formalities. I adopted my role in the familial set-piece one last time, partook of the usual lies. We all agreed that this wasn’t going to change anything, and nobody deviated enough from the script to call anyone else a liar on that account. And finally—careful to say until next time rather than goodbye —we took our leave of my mother.

I even suppressed my gag reflex long enough to give her a hug.

Jim had his inhaler in hand as we emerged from the darkness. I hoped, without much hope, that he’d throw it into the garbage receptacle as we passed through the lobby. But he raised it to his mouth and took another hit of vassopressin, that he would never be tempted.

Fidelity in an aerosol. “You don’t need that any more,” I said.

“Probably not,” he agreed.

“It won’t work anyway. You can’t imprint on someone who isn’t even there, no matter how many hormones you snort. It just—”

Jim said nothing. We passed beneath the muzzles of sentries panning for infiltrating Realists.

“She’s gone ,” I blurted. “She doesn’t care if you find someone else. She’d be happy if you did.” It would let her pretend the books had been balanced.

“She’s my wife,” he told me.

“That doesn’t mean what it used to. It never did.”

He smiled a bit at that. “It’s my life, son. I’m comfortable with it.”

“Dad—”

“I don’t blame her,” he said. “And neither should you.”

Easy for him to say. Easy even to accept the hurt she’d inflicted on him all these years. This cheerful façade here at the end hardly made up for the endless bitter complaints my father had endured throughout living memory. Do you think it’s easy when you disappear for months on end? Do you think it’s easy always wondering who you’re with and what you’re doing and if you’re even alive? Do you think it’s easy raising a child like that on your own?