by Charles Yu
A message comes through from the boss.
Velocity?
I check the velocimeter. 8.2 km/h.
Four years go by.
Good, says the boss. Good.
Thanks, I say. Four years go by.
More questions from the boss:
Skin tone?
Discoloration?
Cartilage loss, fin damage, decreased mass?
Blip. Blip blip. I report:
No change.
No change.
No change, no change, no change.
Four years go by.
Good. Anything else?
No.
Four years go by.
Good, he says. How's life on your rock? He doesn't make small talk often.
Same old, I say. Can't really complain. Yours? Four years go by.
You know. Same.
Yeah, I know. Four years go by.
A world explodes in a nearby system.
Is Tina coming soon?
In a bit, I say. Sixteen hundred years.
Four years go by.
Say hi for me, he says.
Okay. Four years go by. Four years, four years, four years.
You okay with money? I say I am. I say I live at the edge of the universe. Where am I going to spend it? Four years go by. Why? I ask him. Four years go by. No reason. Four years. Four years then four more and then four more and just like that seven or eight hundred years can go by and we haven't said a thing.
***
The last time I saw Tina, I asked her to stay on the planet with me. She said it was too cold for her. I said I'd reconfigure the atmosphere, trap some heat, warm up the place. She said she couldn't imagine quitting her job. I said, You deliver cubes of frozen fish for a living. She said she needed the money. I asked her, What are you saving for? The galaxy is in a recession. There's nothing left to buy. I said, The nearest grocery store is two hundred and eighty thousand light-years away and the only things it has worth saving for are the long-stalked sentient mushrooms of Nlakdaviar. She said she had a weakness for those mushrooms. I wanted to tell her I had an entire mountain hollowed out and full of the fungus, cut from the base in early autumn, so the tendrils were white and springy and full of moisture. But I didn't. Instead, I said nothing. It's too cold for me, she said again. She waited for me to say something. Fifteen seconds went by. I wanted more than anything to make my mouth say something. I searched every word in every language I knew, I picked up each one and discarded it—not the right word, not what I mean, not going to work, not enough to make her stay. I did this in fifteen seconds. She looked at me. Hopeful? Annoyed. I said nothing. Another fifteen seconds went by. I let them go right by. Tina flew away. Four years went by. Thirteen thousand two hundred and fifty-one years went by.
***
A message comes through from the boss.
What's new? More small talk. Something's not right.
It's night. The suns go down. Two hundred years go by. It's day.
She was right, though. It was cold here. Less so now. The twin stars of this system are maturing. They burn hotter in their old age.
A message comes through from the boss.
How's Florence?
Fine, I say. Four years go by. Four years, forty years, four hundred years go by.
Tina's coming back any year now.
How will I get her to stay this time? I pull out the brochure for this place. It's yellowed and crumbling. The marketing slogan for the planet is at the top: It's Livable! The picture shows a human woman and a male Xorbite. The Xorbite is pointing at his main lung with a tentacle, as if to say, I am really enjoying this nontoxic nitrogen-based atmosphere! The previous version of the brochure had the woman holding a fish, until someone's mother sued the tourism bureau for false advertising, claiming her son died because the picture misleadingly suggested it was possible to catch fish here. The dead boy's mother won and the bureau had to change the brochure or stop printing it, but since the bureau has no funding, instead of retaking the picture, the bureau just touched it up so that the woman now appears to be holding a football (or possibly a pizza) in one hand and giving the Xorbite a thumbs-up with the other. The happily breathing Xorbite is giving her a tentacles-up sign in return.
***
In terms of size, this is a Class S-4 Small World. Which means from up here, on top of the mountain, I can see the curvature of the horizon. A large cloud might cover a third of the sky.
Four years go by.
It's night. It will last a while.
The suns are setting, one on top of the other. The moons slowly reveal themselves, red, green, orange, and silver. It's not cold, but I know why Tina thought it was. The entire world is covered in cobalt blue dust. It's blue, blue, blue.
Four years go by. Four years, forty years, four hundred years go by.
***
A message comes through from the boss.
What is the nature of where?
I ignore that. No doubt hitting the Q-Grovoyoobian pipe.
What is where? Where is when?
Four years go by. A faraway star implodes.
Something happens. Somewhere.
My aunt moves into the galaxy. Aunt Betty. She never married. My boss used to think she was a looker.
I ask my boss: Do you remember my aunt Betty? His high should have worn off by now.
Four years go by.
Aunt Betty was the smartest of my mother's three sisters. Unbelievably shy.
Her parents, my mother, friends, cousins, everyone tried to help her out of her shell, but that only made her crawl farther away from the opening, deeper into the cavernous interior of herself. She read constantly, kept her eyes down, wrote furiously in a journal. She was smarter than all of us combined. When I first got here, I thought of her, how she could help me figure out Florence.
Then she turned one thousand and everyone tried to set her up with someone. But there are only so many men left. Forty-seven, to be exact. Not a lot of nonrelatives to choose from. She moved away.
And now she's back. She got to that age where she wanted to be near family. Not with family. But near it. I guess I'm family.
***
A message comes through from the boss.
Ah, yes, your aunt Betty. What is the nature of Aunt Betty?
I guess the groovy yooby hasn't worn off yet.
I type: Aunt Betty is a Presbyterian. Is that what you mean?
Christians in the year A.D. 1,002,006 are few and far between. A lot of people don't even know what they are. Mainly because there are hardly any people left. Also, most of us stopped believing in God after black hole XR-97-ID got so massive it started swallowing itself over and over again in a recursive loop—like some cosmic Escher print—resulting in an object ten times the mass of the rest of the known universe. Personally, that did it for me.
Aunt Betty is constantly praying for someone. Her eyes are watching the heavens, expectant, as if it could be any moment now. Any moment now.
My question for her would be, now that we're spread out all over like this, one human to a planet, which one will He show up on? Will He pick one? Will He—in some mysterious way, the mechanics of which are incomprehensible to our finite minds—appear simultaneously on every world on which there are humans? How about the nonhumans? None of them are members of the flock, but when it happens, will they know, too? A Jehovah's Witness once showed up on a nearby moon and beamed me. I waited underground until he went away. Twenty years I waited.
Four years go by.
A message comes through from the boss.
I wrote a poem for you. Do you want to read it?
I don't want to read it.
Four years go by. Eighteen years, seven months, five days, ten hours, thirty-six minutes, and twenty-two seconds go by. Tina is supposed to be here.
Tina's not here.
It's night. It's day.
It's time for Tina to be here, but she's not here.
Something's wrong. Sh
e must have hit something. An asteroid. The Gheymu-mu-mut Belt is a minefield. She was probably tired and got a little careless and got herself nicked by a space rock, sending her ship spinning into another rock, and then it was pinball and she was caroming off asteroids. Or she ran out of fuel between galaxies and she's out there, floating in nothing.
A message comes through from the boss.
Where is here? What is there?
Four years go by.
Where is Tina?
It's night. It's day. It's the night of nights. On the night of nights, all the suns go down, and then all the moons go down, too. The whole world goes dark.
Tina is supposed to be here.
A message comes through from the boss.
Question: When is where?
Answer: Not there.
The boss is losing it. I log off for a while.
Four more years. Tina's not here. Question: Where is
Tina?
Answer: Not here.
***
The night of nights is ending. The suns are coming back up.
I had set it all up. I had candles on the table and a meal, a place for Tina and a place for me and chicken cacciatore and a salad, some spinach leaves and nuts and olives I found in the deep freeze, and a bottle of red wine. I had the chairs set up so we could watch Florence in the subsurface control room.
The blips are blipping.
A nearby asteroid disintegrates. Matter turns into energy; a ripple fans out into the fabric of space-time. For an instant everything in the universe wobbles. Then, with an infinitesimal wiggle, all of Creation slides back into place.
A lot of years go by. I stop counting.
It's night. It's day.
A message comes through from Tina.
I'm sorry. I hope you are okay. I've left the fish on the far side of your moon, the nearest one, for you to retrieve when you have a chance. Give my best to Florence. And go visit your aunt.
P.S. I don't know any other way to say this without sounding insensitive, but I think you should know.
Your boss is dead.
She's lying, I think, she has to be lying. No, she's right and I am the last to know. No, she's lying. Why am I always the last to know? I drink the wine straight out of the bottle and put spinach leaves in my mouth. Florence swims toward me. She's still a mile away, but I can already see her eyes, her six-foot eyes, staring blankly at a point an infinite distance behind my head.
I log back on. A message comes through from the boss.
How's Florence? Good.
Four years go by. Another message.
Velocity? Radius? Stable?
Good. Good. Good.
A message comes through from the boss.
Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good.
Four years go by.
A message comes through from the boss.
I'm so lonely. I've loved you for a million years. You've never seen me. You never will. What is where? Who is how?
***
Fishing around in the storage cabinet above my console, I find the module I'm looking for. It's in the back, dusty. I've never used it before. On the sleeve, in bright pink lettering, is the title, "Is My Friend/ Relative Actually Dead?" I put it in and watch.
The host comes out in a black suit. There is stock footage of the universe. The Narpathian Falls look majestic—one immense waterfall dominating an entire planet. The Great Ice Plains of Farloooofarcha: a world encased in a solid layer of ice ten miles deep. People stopped in their tracks. Cars, jets, birds, balloons frozen in an instant. Preserved until the nearest star goes red giant and melts it. What will happen? Will everyone wake up and go back to their lives?
The tape tells me to pull out the quick reference card. Is My_boss_Actually Dead?
1. Distance has gotten so great that it is impossible to verify whether your loved ones or other people with whom you are in frequent contact are alive or dead.
2. Most of the commercial systems out there use an artificial intelligence program called a logic-plus-intuition engine, or LPI.
3. The way an LPI works is this:
a. You don't need to know how an LPI works.
b. You wouldn't understand anyway.
4. Just go deep down inside yourself and ask one question.
5. Is he or she dead?
6. Remember, go deep down.
7. Deeper.
8. Even deeper.
I throw the card in the trash. I eject the tape and throw it in the trash, too.
A message comes through from the boss.
It's a video message. I have never seen the boss before.
There he is, in all his glory. He's balding.
He starts by taking off his shirt and his tie, then his pants, everything. He's bigger than I imagined, and softer, with a pale pink, nearly hairless torso like a baby's. He's talking to me. How are you? I mean, how are you really? I'm so lonely. He jumps up onto his chair. And now he's singing to me.
I don't want to ask myself. I don't want to go deep down.
***
Four years go by. The boss is still singing. Or he sang. Present tense or past, I don't know. He's a recording, but he's always been a recording. Everyone is a recording to everyone else, a memory, a past transcript embedded in air or water or sound or light. No matter how close they are, they are not here. What they said, when they said it, it is not now.
I decide to write Tina a message. Just for kicks. It'll never get to her. Just for whatever.
I type: You think you're too good for me. I hit Send. It will never get to her. The universe will renew itself, collapse and expand and collapse and expand again before this message finds her out there, in all of that space, all of that distance, a sea of meters, an ocean of impossibility. It will never get to her, I know. I should go visit my aunt Betty. I tell myself I will go visit my aunt Betty. Next year. Or the year after.
***
And then it's silent. It's silent for a long time.
***
Four years go by. Twenty thousand years go by. Florence is circling, not making a noise. It's so quiet. My whole life has been quiet. And now it's getting quieter. Every person in the universe I care about may be dead. And I wouldn't be able to tell. All I can hear is my breathing. And the occasional blip telling me Florence is still alive, still moving through the depths. I should go visit my aunt Betty. She sent another card. She sends one every so often. Years pass. It feels like a lot of them. Years, years, years.
***
I go deep down.
I ask myself:
Is he dead?
Is she dead?
Am I dead?
Four years go by. Florence is circling. It's day. It's night. It's summer. It's winter. It's summer. It's day. It's a storm that lasts eight hundred years.
***
Four thousand years go by.
A voice message from Tina comes through.
Hey, she says.
Hey, I say.
Four years.
Hey, she says.
Hey, I say.
How's Florence?
Is that really what you want to talk about? I say. For the last conversation we'll ever have?
Don't.
Don't what?
Don't be mad at me.
Okay.
No, really. You have to try not to be mad.
I thought you were coming here. The harder I try to hide the self-pity in my voice, the worse it sounds.
Silence. Tina says nothing. Above the hiss and crackle of cosmic background radiation, I can still hear the boss. He has stopped singing. He says: Here is just a special case of there. All heres are really theres.
I really miss you, Tina says.
No, you don't. If you did, you'd be here. You wouldn't be there.
What's the difference if I'm here or there?
Now you sound like my boss, I say. The boss has started singing again.
He knows what he's talking about.
Tina, he's dea
d. And in love with me. And crooning in the nude.
Why do you always want us to be...
Closer?
Yeah. How close is close? How close is enough?
Close enough for us to breathe the same air.
We're breathing the same air now.
You know what I mean, Tina.
Well, at some point some of the molecules of the air you're breathing were probably in my lungs. Eventually we'll breathe the same air, drink the same water, pass the same molecules through our bodies. Eventually.
