Assimilated

by Nick Webb

  I have to believe I’m not alone. She really was there. We shared something. We shared our lives together. We grew up together.

  I gave up on the idea of my mom a long time ago. And, years later, learning that she’d lied to me, I gave her up again.

  But I can’t give up on Willow. Even if she is a lie.

  Day 5000

  I’m almost 21. I’ve built telescopes. I’ve piloted a spaceship faster than any human in history. I’ve lived my entire life as a single, solitary pioneer. I’m a physicist. I’ve learned it all, from general relativity, to quantum mechanics, and even finally figured out how our engines work, how they scoop up energy from the virtual particle background. I’ve even learned how to draw properly, though I’m still but a shadow of an artist compared to Willow.

  I’ve come so far. And now I’m sick. Come down with the same space sickness that Willow did. I’m no doctor, I don’t really understand medicine and how the body works—that was my one area of academic deficiency. But something about the constant radiation combined with the lower gravity and the food I’m eating every day. I’m weak, shaky, have bad diarrhea everyday, I’m lightheaded, I pass out a lot. The only solution is to go into hibernation early.

  I’m still two years out from when I was supposed to enter hibernation for the Big Stop. That period of extreme deceleration is supposed to last two years. But I can’t live like this. Philae says that going into hibernation will cure me.

  Before I go, I’m drawing one last piece. I know I’ll never, ever be even a thousandth as good as Willow, but I tried to get it right. I painted a picture of her, and me, holding each other. Just like that one stupid little stick figure drawing I drew all those years ago. But this time it’s a masterpiece. At least, for my skills it is. I’m taping it to the window. If she’s real, if she’s still alive, and if she ever wakes up, and if she survives the Big Stop, then maybe, just maybe, she’ll see it.

  And remember me.

  Day 6421

  I’m awake.

  More on this later. Damn, my head hurts.

  Day 6422

  Yesterday was awful. Today’s still bad—I have to dictate this instead of type. Gertie finally got me the right combo of pills, and now I can actually think. I can move without screaming. Still so tired. I kept asking Philae how much time passed. If we made it. If Willow made it. He wouldn’t say. He said it’s best to discover these things by ourselves. He said something strange—he said the most devastating lies are the ones we tell ourselves, but the most liberating truths are the ones we discover on our own.

  Sleep now. Hopefully tomorrow I can get out of bed.

  Day 6425

  I spent three more days in bed, down with a high fever. Something about the space sickness lingered, and triggered an immune response. But I’m better now. Much better. I’m out of bed, but there’s no way I can climb that ladder. And no windows down here in the equipment room where they kept me near the hibernation chamber, so I hope I have strength to climb tomorrow.

  Last Day.

  6426

  I climbed up the ladder. All the way to the seventh floor, to my observatory. When I looked out the window, I noticed something strange. The stars were there, just as it appeared they always were, but these looked different, somehow. And the observatory was lit with a strange glow. When I looked out the window, I saw the source of the light. It was so bright that it hurt my eyes—I saw a terrible black circle, an afterimage, for ten minutes afterward.

  That meant one thing, and only one thing.

  The holographic projectors were off. I was really looking out the window. At real stars. At a real sun. When I pointed my Newtonian at a particularly bright star, it wasn’t a star.

  It was a planet. Finally, after all those years of studying astronomy, building telescopes, trying to find things to point my refractor at, and then my Cassegrain, and then my Newtonian, finally I found something different.

  But I’d always had something worth looking at.

  I turned my scope down, to where she was. To Hope 92. And there it was—it was so close, closer than it ever had been before, so close that I almost didn’t need my Newtonian to look at it.

  But I looked anyway. There was the picture of the valley glowing in the late afternoon sun. Behind it, taped to the wall, was the old stick figure picture I’d drawn. The one that made Willow feel loved. And near that was her Celestron, assembled from the plans I’d made her.

  She wasn’t there.

  But taped next to the valley painting, written in beautiful script, was a note.

  Alex. I’ve been waiting for you for so long.

  I’m real, I’m alive. And I love you.

  You’ll be a farmer. I’ll be a doctor.

  You’ll be an astronomer. I’ll be a painter.

  Welcome home.

  The Stars That Bind is definitely my most … metaphysical story. It’s premised on the fact that the universe is expanding. As in, space itself is stretching, like the surface of a balloon. As a result of this stretching, galaxies and larger structures are moving away from each other, in general. And there is a horizon in the universe such that all the objects beyond that horizon are moving away from us faster than the speed of light, and therefore not only invisible to us but basically beyond our reality. I mean, they’re not actually moving faster than the speed of light, but the intervening space between us and them is being created so fast that to traverse that newly created space we’d have to travel faster than light, which is, of course, impossible.

  This story takes that idea, and fast forwards it billions of years into the future when humans have expanded out into the universe using hyper-advanced technology, and as a result of having colonized every single part of the universe, there are inevitably some parts on one side of the universe that get cut off from the other, and it’s only getting faster and will one day result in every galaxy being cut off from every other. The leadership of the empire that rules the universe see this as catastrophic and seeks a way to save humanity from this great stretching event.

  The Stars That Bind veers a little into the metaphysical though, in that I explore what reality is, and how it depends on us as people connected to each other, whether by friendship or family. What does it mean for one part of the universe to be cut off from another part with which it had contact before? Do they become two realities? Are there infinite realities? And what happens when you add faster than light travel (say, through wormholes) to the mix? Say point A is cut off from point B, but at the exact middle between them, point C is cut off from neither of them. Could people from point A meet at point C with people from point B? Lots to think about there. Does that become a sort of quantum event, where, for lack of a better phrase, a new universe is created every time one of these paradoxes happen? Paradoxes and, probably, unanswerable questions are unavoidable without questioning the fundamental nature of reality and being itself.

  And all of this is set against a backdrop of, basically, the Roman Empire in space. What better historical example of a fragmenting empire than the Romans to use in a situation where it is space itself, not just a society, that is becoming fragmented, disjointed, and ultimately falls because it got too big, and yet provided the seed for dozens, even hundreds of future nations.

  Anyway, that’s a long way of saying, prepare yourself. Extremely speculative fiction ahead.

  The Stars That Bind

  I

  Year 2,335,901,677 IE (Intergalactic Era)

  Telestia, Ophir Galaxy, Regulix Spur of the Virgo Supercluster

  In the beginning, the Great Intergalactic Empire couldn’t even fathom that it could one day cease to exist. Billions of galaxies. Billions of billions of inhabited star systems. Worlds and people almost without number. Empires that thrive for eons don’t just simply fall, and they certainly don’t admit defeat.

  But it could fall. Proconsul Gaias Justus knew it. The most detailed star maps and most celebrated cosmic physicists in the empire confirmed it. The final
report lay on his desk, unopened. He knew what it would say—the report itself was only a formality.

  The Empire was dying.

  Not from invaders. Not from insurgents or separatists. No external or internal threat was a match for the incontestable might of the Great Intergalactic Empire. It ruled from the Virgo Supercluster to the Great Attractor in the Centaurus Quadrant of the universe.

  But fall it would, unless Gaias Justus could stop it. A civilization comprising trillions of billions of worlds, literally torn apart at the seams.

  The door to his simple, utilitarian office burst open. Emperor Fornax, billowing in great blue robes. Head held high and noble. And scared. Gaias Justus could see it in his eyes. The way he carried his shoulders. The way his lips pressed a little tighter than usual.

  “Out of the question!” The emperor waved his honor guard off, and the pair of mechanically suited centurions bowed out the door.

  “And why do you say that, my lord?” Gaias knew exactly what the other man would say. One did not submit such drastic proposals to such men without knowing beforehand exactly what would happen.

  Fornax waved his arms again. “I gave you the task of saving the empire, not hastening its ruin!” He sat down on the couch nearby, sweeping his billowing robe out from under him.

  Gaias folded his hands on his desk and smiled. “Sometimes, my lord, to stem the cancer, one must cut off the limb. To survive the fall, one must dive headfirst into the water. To beat the odds, one must take—”

  “Enough of your irrelevant metaphor!” Emperor Fornax usually didn’t have trouble containing his temperament—the man was, after all, the most capable politician in the known universe, his line bred and perfected for millennia and the man himself trained for decades. But he was clearly struggling. He was desperate not to be known as the emperor who, after a long, successful line of close to five million emperors before him who had all managed to pass along the empire relatively unscathed to their successors, lost it all.

  “It won’t take effect overnight, my lord. We won’t even know of its success or failure for thousands of years! We’ll both be long dead before anyone can malign us.”

  Fornax brushed him off. “Regardless. When those history books are written, I will not be known as the one who initiated the collapse of civilization.”

  “We don’t even know it will collapse. In fact, my team of scientists and anthropologists are giving the plan excellent odds. Over fifty percent.”

  “Nonsense.” Fornax sighed. He looked up at the star map projected onto the wall of the office. He stood up and stalked over to it, glancing at its periphery. “Look. The Tolaris Cluster of galaxies. My grandfather settled it. Led an armada of a million ships. Subjugated half a dozen petty local lords and liberated trillions of people. And now look at it. In less than a thousand years it will be completely cut off from the cluster that his grandfather settled.” His eyes drifted to the opposite edge of the star map. The entire known universe, sprawled onto one unremarkable wall in an unassuming office on Telestia, the central governing planet of the Great Intergalactic Empire.

  “Which is why we must act quickly, my lord. Any more delay could have disastrous consequences.”

  Fornax leaned forward against the wall, supporting himself with a balled-up fist. His eyes flashed dangerously. “Find…another…way,” he said.

  “This way has the highest odds of succeeding, my lo—”

  Fornax held up a hand. “I said, ‘find another way.’ We will not split this empire, this great human family, up into fifty or ten or even two pieces. We stay together and united. At all costs. That is my final word on the subject.” And with a flourish of his blue robes, Emperor Fornax, 4,995,801st of his line, swept back out of the room.

  Leaving Proconsul Justus smiling. So predictable. So easy to read. He swiped at his desk, initiating a transgalactic transmission to his counterpart in the Laconis Spur of the Centaurus Supercluster. The woman’s face snapped into focus, hovering just inches over the desk.

  “And?”

  Gaias Justus smiled. “It worked beautifully, Proconsul Kestus. As expected, he rejected the plan.”

  She nodded, a warm smile spreading over her lined face. “Good.”

  “His father was the same way. Propose something absolutely outrageous, and when they fluster and sputter and rage, then you give them the only slightly less outrageous real proposal, which they accept with grateful arms.”

  “Very astute, my love,” she said. “And when do you propose we tell him the real plan?”

  My love. He smiled inwardly at the endearment. They’d been married, and divorced, and married again, and divorced anew, and had gone back and forth in their relationship so many times that he was never sure where they stood. Something about ambitious politicians—their first love was always their career. “I’ll let him stew for a few days, then propose the feint again. When the vein in his temple nearly bursts, I’ll acquiesce, and give him the real plan.”

  She leaned in toward her projector, which made her head grow a bit larger. “And the real plan? Will it work? Gaias, we have to be sure about this.”

  Gaias Justus looked down and fiddled with the unopened report still sitting on his desk. “After a fashion, yes.” He rubbed his eyes. The long nights working on the greatest threat the empire had ever faced were taking a harsh toll on his health. “Nothing lasts forever, my dear, as we both are well aware of,” he added with a wink, alluding to their own history. “But out of death comes rebirth. Always. It is the unchanging law of the universe. The universe may one day die. But out of our efforts, a new one will be born. An infinite number of universes, if my hopes prove correct.”

  Proconsul Kestus looked skeptical. “I hope you’re right, Gaias.”

  He nodded. So did he. In fact, despite the data and simulations, hope was about all he had.

  II

  Seven hundred years later

  Planet Gryphin, Daedalus Galaxy, Coma Supercluster

  “But papa, I want to come too!” Cassalla, the precocious ten-year-old daughter of Supreme Admiral Gherens, clung tenaciously to him, and if he knew anything about her inherited stubbornness she was not giving up without an epic battle.

  “No, little star. Not this time. But come. Let’s enjoy one last evening in the planetarium.” He smiled, and she released her hold on him. The past few weeks had been difficult. They had all known this moment was coming. For years. But as the time fast approached he was growing increasingly reluctant.

  She fell into step next to him. “Ok, papa star. But this conversation is not over. We’re going to talk about our trip to Telestia. The one you keep saying we’ll take someday.”

  Inherited stubbornness. He had it. His parents and their parents had it. He assumed it went all the way back to Gaias Justus and Celestia Kestus. Their stubbornness was legendary. Gaias had refused to let the empire just fade away into chaos and nothingness. Hence the Binding.

  They strolled the grounds of their opulent estate toward the distant dome, hand in hand. She was his life. Since her mother had died unexpectedly, she was all he had.

  “You’ll be back soon, right?”

  He paused. “In a sense…”

  “Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

  He smiled at her and squeezed her hand harder. “It means I love you, little star, and no matter how much space or time separates us that will never change. Understand?”

  A small smile graced her lips, but she looked down.

  The interior of the planetarium always appeared larger than the outside would seem to permit. The inside is always bigger than the outside, Gherens thought, and not just in the planetarium. The great wheel of their galaxy loomed overhead, and at a brush from his finger on the controls, the view expanded to include the vast filamentary structures of their galactic neighborhood: thousands, millions of galaxies all pulled into strings and bunches and filaments, like the cotton candy at the local midsummer fair.

  “What would you like t
o see today, my love?”

  She pointed at the edges. “Show me the Gaias plan again.”

  Always. It was like she knew the plan would determine their family’s destiny. On instinct.

  “Very well,” he said, and he expanded the star map until it encompassed most of the visible universe. Over fifty billion light-years, from end to end.

  Fifty billion, and shrinking rapidly. By the time he was dead, that number would be forty-nine-point-nine-nine billion.

  He pointed to the far-right edge. “The Pollux Cluster of galaxies. The farthest point from us. Soon, it will be gone forever.”

  “I still don’t get it, papa. How can it be there today, and gone tomorrow?”

  “It will not be gone, little star. It will still exist. But it will be gone to us. Unreachable. Even with dimensional leaps, even with our fastest ships, it will forever be beyond our reach. That, unfortunately, is the nature of space-time.”

  “The expansion?”

  He nodded. “The expansion.” He zoomed in on the Pollux Cluster. “By next year, we will be cut off forever from the most distant galaxy of that cluster. Because the fabric of the universe is expanding, that galaxy will soon be receding away from us faster than the speed of light. And, by immutable cosmic law, we can never reach it again. It will no longer exist to us.”