by BL Craig
His focus was broken by Alex. Pointing at the bridge clock she said, “It’s your rest time now, William”
“I can keep working. I’m not tired,”
“I think we have done enough for now. It’s good to take a break and let your brain process.”
“I’m too distracted to rest and I don’t want to run into Brooks. It’s a small ship when you don’t want to run into someone, you know.”
“Yes, he is a problem. He is mourning and he does not handle his emotions well.”
“Mourning?”
“Jasco, your predecessor, was John’s partner.”
William thought back to his perusing of the feeds. Had he overlooked the relationship because of his desire to avoid thinking of all things John Brooks? “I didn’t know that.” he said. “No one mentioned it. I guess I should have asked. I’m still so used to the Navy where most people change postings every few years. What happened to Jasco?”
“Jasco was very old. Not as old as me, but still old. We don’t live forever, you know. As we age, we change. Some fail in body, but most begin to fail in mind first. Jasco was failing in both. He became erratic, emotional—and his fine motor control was going. Bad things for a pilot. Sarah tried to help him. The technicians on Vaikuntha tried as well, but he was declining. He didn’t want to go slowly, piece by piece. He did not want to endanger the crew. John was taking over more and more of Jasco’s duties and neglecting his own. Jasco knew he would be reassigned soon to some place far away from use while he waited to die—or perhaps the company would simply refuse to replenish his Elixir. He didn’t want that, so he ended himself.”
“How do you do that? From talking to Sarah there aren’t a lot of good ways for us to die.”
“It is possible, if you know the way. He did not want to go back to AfterLife, so we buried him on a captured asteroid in a lovely white dwarf system. We told the supervisors that he died in a depressurization accident.”
“I’m sorry,” William said, softly.
“Yes, it was very sad, but he was with people he loved and got to say goodbye. Most of us do not get that in our 1st or 2nd lives. I am sorry John has fixated on you, but I think he will get over it eventually. We all know that Mirada was not your fault.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“Your guilt shows that you are not callous to the harm that was done, but it is a wasted emotion if you can’t do anything about it. You can’t bring back those people and nothing you could have done would have stopped their deaths. All you can do is learn from the past and try to do better going forward.”
Despite her strangely flat affect, Alex was clearly emotionally insightful. Her words were kind and pragmatic. This whole crew was grieving, he realized. Not just Brooks. Now he had stepped in, an unwelcome replacement. No wonder everything was strange. He had no idea how to ease their pain, or at least not exacerbate it with his presence. His own grief threatened to become all-consuming in the strange, flat way that his emotions seemed to work now. He waited until he got back to his cabin to tap the port on his wrist and let the fuzzy wave roll over him.
* * *
…
* * *
After William left, Alex returned to the charts, but found herself distracted. She thought about Jasco. Like William, he had been blonde and handsome. He had evinced an outgoing charm that she suspected William might grow to demonstrate as he moved past grief and loss. She missed her old friend, and way they used to share bawdy jokes and play partners at bridge with mercenary accuracy. Jasco counted cards like a bot and Alex read the other players expressions like open books. Those days had ended long before Jasco died. It was strange how differently the change had taken them both. He had flamed brightly, raging, passionate, out of control. She had dimmed, growing colder and remote. She was not sure how much longer she had. Would she simply become like the drones, emotionless and automatic? The thought saddened her, but the sadness was heartening. She still felt. It grew harder and harder to show those emotions to her crew. She was apart from them, aloof, but she still cared. She cared about their well-being. She mourned with John. She wanted to reach out to him, to share that grief, but she was too far gone. He needed tears and touch and sorrowful looks. She found the prospect deeply daunting.
She wondered if John would feel better to know that William had not been lying? Or perhaps he just needed a way to vent his spleen and William was the unfortunate target? She felt sorry for the young man. She had lived a full first life surrounded by a close-knit family and full of meaningful work. William was so young and so lost.
* * *
…
* * *
William paced the halls thinking about what Alex had said about Brooks grieving his dead lover. What could William do to make peace with the man? William’s dad had always called William’s need to move around when thinking, “William’s Walk and Wonder Wander.” He thought about Dad. William had never doubted his father loved him, but he knew that his dad didn’t love him enough, not the way a father should love. Not the way he had loved Sophie. Loving her had broken him. It had broken them all.
He took a turn and nearly fell over Sarah, who was on all fours drawing on the floor, surrounded by jars of paints, a drop cloth, brushes and other implements.
“You’re the mystery painter!” he exclaimed.
“Mystery? Everyone knows I paint.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“You could have asked. Anyone would have told you.”
“I thought the painting was done like, before, when the Tilly was a commercial vessel.”
“Oh, no, it was bland as balls when I got here. The Captain had hung up a few of those flavorless space pictures you see in waiting rooms, but beyond that? Nada.” She mimed empty hands. “The mural in the mess hall is my nod to the old pictures.”
“Wow, and the Captain doesn’t mind?”
“Nah, she knew those pictures were dumb, but there wasn’t much else she could get her hands on.”
“And it’s just OK? With AfterLife, I mean.”
“I used to scrape them all off or paint over them before inspection, but I stopped a couple of years ago. No one really cares as long as we do our jobs.
“How many have you painted?”
“This is 57. Or 58? I forget.”
“And you just painted over them? That must have been painful.”
“I keep a picture of each one, but it’s more about the process than the product anyway. I still paint over some of them sometimes, if I decide I don’t like them, or something else would be better in that spot.”
“Do you mind if I watch? I need a quiet distraction.”
“Knock yourself out.”
He watched as she finished penciling in a rough outline and began laying down coats of white and grey. “Is it obnoxious if I talk to you while you work?”
“Thought you said you wanted quiet?”
“Yeah, I guess I’m crap at quiet. Sorry.”
“No worries. I’ll tell you to shove off if you get annoying.”
He decided to break his entirely self-enforced ban on FirstLife talk. She had held him while he sobbed and howled. That made an awkward question or two seem pretty pale in comparison. “How did an artist end up as an environmental engineer on a survey ship?”
“I died.”
William waited.
“I’m not an artist. It’s just a hobby.”
“You could have fooled me. You’re pretty good.”
“Hmm.”
“How long have you been on the Tilly?”
“Coming up on 13 years.”
“Do you like it here?”
“It has its benefits. The Captain is fair and competent. The rest of us get on well enough, but you already know that. I mean, it’s better than being a mindless drone building chairs or cleaning sewers. Then again, maybe not. The toilers seem happy enough.”
He had never heard the term “toiler” before. “I had no idea that a person coul
d reanimate and stay the same, or mostly the same, until I woke up on that table. I mean there were vague things like, rare “highly-effective reanimates,” but nothing like, this.” He made a vague gesture encompassing them both. “Why is it such a secret?”
“It would be disturbing to the humans if they knew. Worse if they had to interact with folks like us. People sign those mortgage contracts because they think they’ll be dead. They’re just signing over scrap parts.”
“You say the humans as though we aren’t human.”
“Everything depends upon personal and social definitions.”
“So, you choose not to think of yourself as human?’
“I observe the standards for determining membership in an ethnic group. An outsider can determine if someone is a member of a group by other members of that group’s signals of the status of the individual in question.”
“Isn’t that logic a bit circular?”
“Yes, but it is surprisingly effective, and it gets around issues of ancestry and place of birth, which can be confounding.”
“So, living humans don’t think of us as human, therefore we are not? Isn’t that the sort of rational that causes, I don’t know, genocide?”
“Like, Mirada?”
William winced.
“Yeah, it’s all crap. Of course, we’re people. We’re just not human, anymore. We’re homo morte.”
“What were you, a sociology professor?”
“Social anthropology, actually.”
“So how does a dead artist slash anthropology professor end up as the engineer on a survey vessel?”
Sarah sat up and wiped the brush she had been using off on a rag.
“My mom was a technical engineer. My dad was a comparative lit professor. They fought over me and my sister long after they’d divorced. When I got interested in anthropology, Mom considered it a defection to his side.”
“Wait, both of your parents had vocations?”
“Yup. Weren’t your parents Navy?”
“No, my parents had SecondLife mortgages, like normal people.” Caring for Sophie had taken up too much time for other pursuits.
“Well, mom would only agree to help me with University tuition if I majored in something ‘useful.’ So, I double majored in bioengineering. I got a fellowship after my second year at university and dropped the science. That much study and a natural aptitude was enough for Afterlife to put me here after I died.”
“So, you were an overachiever before you died, and AfterLife doesn’t have a lot of use for anthropologists?”
Sarah gave him a sour look. “What about you? Were you one of those kids who always wanted to be a flyboy?”
“No. I wanted to study history. I got a small lacrosse scholarship at a decent university, but after Dad died there was no money left. The school wouldn’t take me since I didn’t have enough credit to cover the rest.”
“And the Navy doesn’t have a lot of use for historians.”
“Yeah. Particularly for wannabe historians.”
“So, you went from history major to pilot. That’s weird.”
“I’m good at math and physics and can stay conscious at seven gees. They have a type they like for pilots and seven gees is 85% of it. I was fortunate to get accepted to the Academy instead of having to enlist.”
“Why wasn’t there any money for school? I mean, why couldn’t you take out a loan? My fellowship wasn’t quite enough to cover costs, so I took out a loan. That’s how I ended up here on a 20 year contract.”
William considered not telling her. Over the years he had gotten good at not talking about it. But he remembered the pill and her arms around him as he had sobbed on his rack. It was not that he owed her, but for the first time he wanted to say out loud all the things no one had ever wanted to hear. “Were you aware that SecondLife Mortgages have a ‘willful destruction of property clause?’”
“No, what’s that?” she said, brow furrowed.
“Well, if someone kills themself and causes their body to be unusable for reanimation, the obligation passes on to the heirs. Or in my case heir, singular.”
“What happened?” she asked, horror tinged curiosity evident on her face.
“Dad’s brain was growing a tumor. The doctor told him that it would probably keep him from being a viable reanimate. He became ‘high risk’, so AfterLife would not give him more loans. No loans meant no money for treatments. He knew it was going to be a painful, slow decline, and he’d already had some life experience with that. He left the loan office and threw himself in front of the maglev.
“I like to think he didn’t realize that the train would mangle his body so bad that he couldn’t be reanimated. When I’m feeling really magnanimous, I blame the tumor. Or maybe he’d forgotten the clause in the contract about ‘willful destruction of AfterLife property.’ But if I’m honest with myself, I just think he didn’t care anymore.”
William paused. His eyes had been roving over the blobs of color on the floor. He looked up at Sarah who was listening attentively, chewing her lower lip.
“So, his debt passed to me. AfterLife confiscated the house, what was left in the accounts, and everything else of value, leaving me with 87 years of service. University was out, so I joined the Navy, assisted in the massacre of thousands of drones and untold innocent Rannit civilians, and got stabbed in the neck by a waiter while I was waiting for my girl to arrive so I could propose.”
“Damn, Butcher. That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.”
“Yeah, it’s not great.” He looked back at the outlines on the floor trying to figure out what they were going to be. She stayed quiet a moment.
“Now I’ve made things weird,” he said exhaling. “I never know how to tell that story. Everyone knew I had a mortgage in the Navy and they all wanted to know why, cause no one else there had one. It was always a conversation killer and now I just added the extra awful new bits.”
She snorted lightly. “Tragedy is stock and trade for the dead,” she said. “It’s strange, most people live long carefree 1st lives, but for some reason there is an excess for weird shit among the atypes.”
He wondered why that was. Did having a shitty life change something about the brain that made people better undead?
Sarah resumed roughing in the painting. He watched for a moment but it felt awkward just watching her after his little revelation. He pushed off the wall he was leaning on and opened his mouth to make a polite excuse.
Before he could form the words, Sarah blurted out. “Bet you I can tell you something worse that will make you feel better.” There was a mischievous look on her face as she turned her head back toward him.
“Why would hearing something worse make me feel better?” he asked with a puzzled expression.
“Oh-ho!” She clapped her hands like a small child. “An experiment in human emotionality! I will demonstrate but there need to be stakes.” She pondered a moment, “A bet!” she declared.
He watched her little performance with uncertainty. The he shook his head, “OK sure, what do you want to bet?”
“Hmmm,” she cocked her head in thought. “The loser has to sing The Major General’s song from Pirates of Penzance for the whole crew.”
“Let me guess, you’re also an opera singer?” he said dryly.
“Nope, I can’t carry a tune to save my life, and I get stage fright.”
“Then why would you set those terms?” he asked. “This is your bet.”
“Because I’m going to win,” she grinned wolfishly.
“What if I love singing in public?” he countered.
“Then we both get to enjoy a lovely performance. Deal?” she held out her hand.
“Deal,” he said shaking her hand, getting a smudge of white paint on his thumb in the process. “My god, I’m a terrible person. I’m not sure you’re a good influence on me.”
“OK,” her voice dropped dramatically, “you have to promise not to tell anyone I told you this.”
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“OK,” he said. Who was going to listen to him anyway? Sarah was the only one who talked to him.
She cupped her hands next to her mouth and leaned toward him conspiratorially. “Addy kind of killed himself because he fell in love with a drone and wanted to be with her forever.”
William stood still for a moment taking that in. The drones he had met were virtually incapable of ignoring an order and terribly literal. Ignoring the perversity of a romantic entanglement between living and dead, William simply could not wrap his mind around a drone reciprocating a romantic attachment, let alone giving consent to anything that implied. He started to speak once, closed his mouth and then finally words just came pouring out. “No. Oh my god, really? That’s so fucking wrong. Did he get caught? Is it illegal? He was like a . . . a droneaphile? How did he even spend time with a drone? Was he renting her? Do they do that? Rent out drones? Did she love him back? Oh, I can’t believe I said that. Is that possible? Why would you tell me that? Why would he admit it? I mean how did you find out?”
She smirked and chuckled during his verbal vomiting of questions and disgust. “You spend enough time with a small group of people and the secrets go surprisingly quickly. She was a test pilot for his FTL designs. He wasn’t having sex with her. As far as I can tell Addy doesn’t do sex. Not now and not when he was alive.”
William filed that tidbit away. The implication that some dead were still interested in sex.
“We talked about it,” she continued. “I think he just liked to spend time with her. She talked with him. I get the impression she was the first person that enjoyed spending time with him.”
“She did?” William asked. Did drones enjoy things?
Sarah shrugged, “He says it was true love. When AfterLife found out he had become attached to her, they were going to move her. He couldn’t let her go, so he took out an AfterLife contract and jumped them both to Elysium in one of the test ships.”
