Peter David - After Earth

Instead he slowly sat down.

Then Faia spoke up. Her voice was flat and even and filled with quiet rage. “May I be excused, General?”

Cypher turned and looked at her in surprise. He’d just been in the middle of disciplining his son, the failure. He clearly was not expecting his wife to intervene.

Nor did she wait for him to respond. Without a word she pushed her chair back, stood, and then walked quietly away into the kitchen. That left Cypher and Kitai in a horrendously awkward situation, the two of them sitting there in uneasy silence while the empty chair seemed silently to accuse them of screwing things up.

“You’re excused,” Cypher finally said.

Upon hearing those words, Kitai was out of there like a shot, leaving Cypher alone with his feelings and his meal.

The guest room. That was what Cypher had just entered. Indeed, if anyone had asked whose room it was, he or she simply would have been informed that it was the guest room, and that was all.

The problem was that both Cypher and Faia knew whose room it was. It was Cypher’s room. On the infrequent days when Cypher was at home, it was where—most nights—he stayed. Faia slept in their bedroom, and Cypher slept here. Cypher wasn’t even sure that Kitai was aware of it. If a boy assumes that his parents are sleeping together, why would he question the idea?

Cypher finished depositing his bag in the guest room and sat down in a chair for a few minutes to regain his strength.

My strength. Once upon a time I could have off-loaded it with one hand tied behind my back. Now I’m actually tired . He stretched his arms out to either side and winced at the pain in his shoulder. That would go away before too long, but the older he got, the more often he would feel unwanted pains and the slower they would be to depart.

He lay back on the bed and stared at the walls of the guest room. The walls provided the other aspect of the room, namely, that it was his shrine to Senshi.

The wall was made of smart fabric, and family pictures had been transferred to it. The images moved slowly but deliberately across the cloth. There was Senshi, from her birth right up to a photo that had been taken two days before her death. Her entire life laid out in a series of pictures. Normally they simply sat there unmoving. But when Cypher entered the room and said, “On,” the pictures would start to unfurl their individual stories. There she would be, running and laughing, or picking up her father’s cutlass for the first time, or singing some merry holiday song.

Each of the pictures had an icon next to it, and Cypher zeroed in, as he typically did, on an image of her in a Ranger uniform. It had been taken the day of her graduation from the academy, the day she became a full-fledged Ranger. He had been so proud of her that day. So proud. It was hard for him to believe that any parent had ever been prouder of a child.

Cypher reached toward the picture, and his finger touched the icon.

Instantly the picture obeyed, growing from the small image on the smart fabric wall to full size. He was no longer staring at a small, short film. Instead it had completely enveloped him. He was in the middle of a cheering crowd of people at the graduation, shouting and applauding not just for their own children but for the graduation of every single kid. Because they knew full well that every Ranger was a dedicated protector of Nova Prime and its people and thus deserved the cheers of every person in the crowd.

He glanced over to his right and saw Faia and himself sitting right where they were supposed to be. Kitai was in his mother’s lap and had fallen sound asleep. Cypher supposed he couldn’t blame him. There’d been a lot of talking and speeches before the actual pinning ceremony, and it had fried Kitai’s abilities to stay awake past what his young age would allow.

Enveloped in the fake reality of that wonderful day, Cypher could only watch as any other ghost would watch. He had no means of actually interacting with anyone in the scene.

Senshi climbed up the steps to the platform as her name was called out. Her pin of service was attached to her uniform amid much applause and cheering. Senshi held her cutlass straight up then, twirling it several times in some mildly ornate maneuvers. She didn’t do anything too fancy, not because she couldn’t but because she didn’t want to show up any of her fellow graduates.

Cypher and Faia had had their own recording equipment, but this footage had been taken by a Ranger cameraman who had then provided copies to everyone who was interested. Cypher was most definitely interested, and as he watched Senshi step down from the stage, he couldn’t resist. He headed straight toward her, his arms open. He positioned himself so that Senshi was walking right toward him, and he threw open his arms to receive her.

She passed right through him like a specter, and he turned and watched as she went to her “real” parents behind him. Cypher of the past wrapped his arms around her, and Faia grinned and said wonderful things while the young Kitai continued to slumber in her arms. Senshi laughed at that, and she reached over and kissed her little brother on the head. He stirred a bit in his sleep but did not awaken.

They were together, and they were a family. A family that Cypher was able to remember only vaguely.

And the strangest thing of all was that when he had thought back on that wonderful day previously, he had forgotten that Kitai was even there. He’d just assumed that they’d gotten a babysitter for him.

Tears welled up in Cypher’s eyes. He would never have allowed himself to be seen reacting in that manner outside this room, but inside it, he could react however he wished, as all around people cheered for the accomplishments of Senshi Raige and all the other Rangers.

In her office, Faia was hunched over a table with holographic wind turbines. She had spent weeks building them to perfect scale, but she still didn’t have the power supply linked in so that they would turn automatically. That didn’t matter to her, though. After all, it wasn’t as if wind blew automatically, either. Instead, she very carefully spun the turbines with her hand and then jotted down the information she was able to acquire. Low-tech it may have been, but the results she was receiving were as reliable as anything else she might accomplish.

Then she heard a soft footfall at the door. She turned in her chair, and Cypher was standing there with a small, pained smile on his face. She gazed into his eyes and saw no hint of the man who had treated his son with carefully maintained indifference at dinner.

“Look at that,” she said, studying him carefully, tilting her head one way and then the other. “Yep. Cypher’s back. General Raige had him hostage.”

He crossed the room and sat down in a small chair beside her. He reached out tentatively, and she took his hand, squeezing it warmly. He sighed. It was as if he were relaxing right into her.

“I have a last mission to Iphitos. Flying tomorrow,” he said. Iphitos was a small planet, one of six anchorages over in the Milky Way’s next spiral arm. Residing there was not for the faint of heart. There was a colony of maybe a hundred or so people, and they were getting ready to see if Iphitos could be terraformed from a training facility and Ursa respository into something more welcoming to human habitation. They could just as easily have been attacked by the Skrel as Nova Prime had been so often over the centuries, but so far that hadn’t happened. The general assumption was that the colony was simply so small that the Skrel hadn’t taken any notice of it, the several million people residing on Nova Prime posing a far greater threat.