Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

“You’ll make a great husband, Naoki.” She had to look away from his happiness.

“Thanks. Oh, I found out about those girls, too.” He flopped into the chair, pulled a reader out of his bag and waved it at her. “That story’s really sad.”

Dot sat upright. “What?”

“Yeah, I had to dig deep into the secure database. The information was really buried. So terrible, too. Not long after the war started, witnesses said the mother shouted something about…” he checked the reader “…hearing the voices in her head, seeing what they were doing. Seeing everything. Seeing death.” He glanced up. “Completely insane. Pulled out a gun—she was in the military—and killed the kids and their father, then killed herself. The kids were only in their early teens.”

“The girls are dead.” It wasn’t a question.

Naoki’s painted mouth drooped. “It’s not your fault what happened, Dotti. You said you saved their lives in the fighting, but you had no control over what their mother did.”

“They’re dead.” She rose, trembling. “Those little girls are dead, and I killed them.”

“Hey, steady,” Naoki said, standing and moving back.

“They’re not up there! They’re dead and they’re not up there!” She used her laser-cutter appendage to cut open the discolored patch of concrete floor, revealing a storage hole. From that she pulled out her helix gun and stared at it. “I killed them.”

“Where the hell did you get that?” Naoki yelled.

“This is all corrupt. Everything is corrupt,” Dot said. “All lies!”

“Dot, please—”

“I won’t lie anymore.” She threw off her robe and went into combat mode: ice-cold and emotionless. She released an appendage and used it to project the bodycam recording of her conversation with Cadre Zheng onto the wall.

Naoki watched, mesmerized, as his fiancée spoke about him. One hand covered his mouth and he gasped.

Dot snapped off the recording. “You’re a clone, honey. I lied.”

“I’m a clone?” His shattered eyes focused on her. “You lied?”

“We all lie. All of us. Everything is corruption, and rot, and lies. She backed you up against your wishes. She killed you.”

“But I love her,” Naoki said weakly.

“She made you to use you,” she said with venom. “Just like they made me to kill. You’re a body to make her the babies she can’t make herself.”

“No,” he said, staggering back. He wiped the back of his hand over his face. “This is what it feels like?”

“This is what it feels like. Your soul is a lie, your mind is false, and your body is a copy. Nothing about you is real.”

“I’m not real,” he whispered.

She checked the weapon’s energy cell: still full. She smiled grimly at Naoki and held the gun out to him. He took it, still dazed, and held it as if he couldn’t see it.

“You pull the trigger, and it all goes away. Everything goes away.” She backed up until her carapace pressed against the wall. “Use it on me, and then go up and use it on her.” Her eye fell on the bucket of acid rain. “Take the water and make her a cocktail to celebrate your engagement, first. None of us deserve to live.”

When he hesitated, Dot projected a looped image of Zheng repeating, Naoki is a clone… Naoki is a clone… Naoki is a clone.

A tear dug a channel in his smooth, white face paint. He picked up the acid bucket and pointed the gun’s muzzle at Dot.

“And then I’ll use it on myself,” he said.

Dot closed her eyes and pictured cherry blossoms on the grass.

Qubits resolve and superimpose; information entangles and de-couples; consciousness re-emerges.

I don’t know for how long I’ve been asleep. There’s so little energy left in the island-ship’s reservoir that I’ve been conserving as much as possible.

A faint glow in the abyss, perhaps several thousand kelvins. It’s why I’ve been awakened.

I change course and head straight for perhaps the last star in the universe.

The universe is in deep winter. This is my conclusion after studying the matter for 6.7 trillion years.

I was born in the fall. I know this because I have learned via the island-ship’s databanks—many more of those were still functional in my youth—that fall was a time of scarlet and crimson, ruby and garnet, vermillion and carmine. The universe was lit up by red stars in all these shades, which formed patterns in the dark velvety sky that I named out of boredom: the Rhombus of Logic Gates, the Qubit Tesseract, the Right-Triangle-Double-Square Proof.

I steered the island-ship by these shifting skymarks, hopping from star to star to harvest their fading fire. The red stars were often so small and feeble that I had to skim close to the surface to siphon off their energy to fuel the island-ship, but their warmth offered such relief from the frigid emptiness of the rest of the universe.

Occasionally, as I swung past the stars, I met creatures strange and wondrous. Some of them were wanderers like me, steering their own island-ships.

“Where are you from?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, good luck anyway!”

We exchanged greetings and learned each other’s languages so that we could share stories around the star-hearth before parting reluctantly after a few billion years on our separate ways.

Others were natives, their island-ships devoid of intelligence and fixed in interminable orbits. These often cowered at my ship’s approach, worshipping me as a god or cursing me as a demon. I tried to not tarry too long in these places, gathering only enough fuel for the journey to the next star. I felt bad for them, doomed to island-ships that could not sail.

Still others were pirates, who tried to board my ship and steal my fuel. A few times, we came to blows, and some memories were destroyed in the process. Luckily, in the end, I always managed to escape with a blast of photonic torrent at the statite sail and left them scrambling in the interstellar dust.

The glow ahead is cooling even as I’m approaching. I hope that I can get there before it turns into a black dwarf and is lost to the abyss forever. The drive to go on is in life’s nature, evolved or otherwise.

I miss home. Even if home is no more.

But all around me, there are no other stars. I don’t have a choice.

The red stars fell into themselves and began to glow white like tiny snowballs. With time, they turned gray, faded, and winked out.

Fall had turned to winter.

I met fewer island-ships. The journey between the dwindling stars lengthened, and I could no longer maintain things as well as I had in my youth. Memory bank after memory bank failed, and no matter how hard I copied and transcribed and entangled and verified—I had to again make the painful decision and let pieces of myself die.

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What is the island-ship?