Departure

by Travis Hill

  Some of the battles between humans and Arans became less about the horror and chaos as bodies were torn apart by long-range weaponry or orbital bombardment, and more about the terror and brutality of hand-to-hand fighting once all of the long-range weapons and orbital weapons platforms had been destroyed. The Arans had been skilled with wielding dual energy lances that vaguely resembled an ancient broadsword, but instead of a sharp blade, the end of the lance carried a device that was an eerie alien version of a human vacuum welder. If human opponents hadn’t been terrified enough at having to fight the aliens up close and personal, they must have gone into shock when they got their first taste of what the lances could do.

  Wherever the lance’s tip touched human flesh, large chunks of skin, muscle, tendons, blood vessels, and bone would vaporize in a flash. The archives had very little media that hadn’t been corrupted by time and inattention, but the images I browsed, taking maybe one breath every thirty seconds I was so drawn into them, showed human soldiers with entire torsos vaporized. Some lost an arm or a leg, some a shoulder and a third of the chest area. The images relayed the insanity that had taken place in the aftermath of a few of the battles, human bodies strewn about as if they’d been dolls tossed carelessly by a child, small piles of black ash scattered everywhere that were the vaporized remains of wherever an Aran lance touched human flesh.

  When human commanders realized there would be no quarter given from either side, that the Arans would fight until death with any weapon, including ‘barehanded,’ which was a bit misleading since the aliens didn’t have what humans would consider hands, they knew the human soldiers would need to be trained in more than just magnetic acceleration rifles and automatic flechette repeaters. After studying thousands of hours of battle footage of Aran hand-to-hand fighting techniques, the humans developed a pulse blade, and they designed the fighting style called Surnan around the use of it as a counter to the dual energy lances.

  I’d never seen a live demonstration before, but I’d watched a recruitment video when I was sixteen and trying out for the Corps. Watching the combatants below me compared with watching the video like being under the blue sky earlier today compared with seeing an image of blue sky. Their fluid movements, graceful attacks and parries, and the occasional thwack of one of the weapons finding a weakness in an opponent’s defense, all the beauty of its organized chaos betrayed the reality of what it really was.

  I wonder if any of the other onlookers would be able to look at the images of what Surnan could inflict in a situation where lives were at stake. The images burned into my memory didn’t contain a mock battle with wooden weapons and protective armor. The real battles on distant planets that probably only few humans alive knew the names of were slaughterhouses, kilometer after kilometer of bodies, human and Aran, some still locked together in mortal combat long after life had departed. Sometimes the bodies were piled as if someone had attempted to build a castle out of them. The pulse blades were every ounce the nightmare for Arans as the energy lances were for our kind.

  I feel a squeeze of my hand and look at Cara. Her smile and her sad eyes are in such contrast that I feel intense shame that I’ve been daydreaming of long-dead human history from a time that has led to this very moment, the very reason we are having my final day on Earth.

  “Who wants to check out the holotorium?” I ask as I place my hands on a shoulder of each of my children.

  “Really?” Jason asks, turning around in his seat to look up at me.

  “Darn right,” I say with a grin. “I think they have the waterfalls and forests restored.”

  Kelle is more than willing to leave the Surnan fighters behind and see something none of us has ever seen. I notice that she’s begun ‘watching the clock,’ so to speak, her distance beginning to grow as her mind begins to try and expunge me from it. She’s had immersion therapy to prepare her for this day, but even with all of the tech that humankind invented or stole from the Arans, the inner mind and how memories are formed, how they correlate to emotions, have never been fully unlocked. Immersion therapy is mostly a brute-force technique that tries to trick her mind into emotional detachment from me.

  It hadn’t seemed to work until the last half hour or so. I knew it was a necessary thing with her and Jason being so young, unable to process the loss of their father like an adult would. After almost twenty years of watching all of the older humans depart, they’d be more inclined to accept it as the way things were and how nothing could be done about it. They’d have had time to make peace and say their goodbyes to family and friends. It would hurt, and there was still a tiny percentage of all humans that couldn’t accept the way the world worked no matter how much immersion or hypnotic therapy they endured. But the hurt was more of a dull throb that went away over time, instead of the white-hot, instant pain that would slice through both of them, possibly leaving a festering wound that might never fully heal.

  *

  My father’s last day on earth had been much different than mine, so far. The part about him walking through the portal would be exactly the same, but instead of our family heading out to see the unblemished sky or spending time in the entertainment district, my father, mother, brother, and I spent the entire day sitting around my parents’ compartment laughing, crying, hugging, remembering, and making our peace with the fact that when we woke up the next day, our father, Mom’s contract partner for twenty-two years, wouldn’t be there anymore. We couldn’t just page him on the comm and ask him how things were going. We couldn’t even visit him at a cemetery, as cemeteries were reserved only for those who died before reaching their departure age. Our genetics and our level of technology had made death by anything but sheer accident almost impossible within the first forty years of life.

  I remember laughing so hard I started to cry at some of the stories we reminisced about. There was the time my brother almost burned down the entire tower with Kalite, and his narrow escape from the Guardian patrols, only to be caught by Dad in the hallway. My father had been so enraged that he couldn’t say a word, and had nearly collapsed on the floor of our compartment. Dale, my brother, had wet himself after watching our dad strangle on his fury and fall to his knees. We laughed just as hard all over again when we remembered how Mom had been so upset that she had spanked Dale until she started crying.

  Neither of them ever asked my brother how he ended up getting his hands on Kalite, and none of us ever spoke a word of it outside our family. If the Guardians ever found out it was my brother who had tried to detonate three kilos of the most powerful explosive known to man that didn’t involve splitting atoms, I’m pretty sure at least half of our tower would have been sent through the Upperjustice portal as punishment.

  Dale never told me how he’d ended up with it either, but I suspect that was more to keep me safe than to lord it over me like older brothers like to do when it came to secrets and power. At least Mom and Dad had been long gone when Dale and his contract partner were vaporized outside of the city. The archives were locked to Cara and I concerning my brother, but one of her friends in the Upperjustice took a peek and told her that the two men were known subversives that had escaped a Guardian sweep in the Bower, their escape beyond the automated Jurda cannons unsuccessful.

  It didn’t surprise me. Dale’s path in life after both of our parents departed diverged from mine considerably, and by the time his ashes were being scattered to the winds outside of the city, it had been decade since I’d spoken to him. I spent a lot of time wondering what he must have been thinking, trying to escape into the wilds with less than three months to go before his departure. He knew what would happen if he missed his departure.

  I fantasized for almost a year that there was some secret group living under the blue skies, far away from the city and its boundaries, undetected or undetectable by the automated drones that patrolled above. I fantasized that the group had developed a counter for missed departures. In the end, all I could do is silently tell his memory how much I missed him, an
d how proud I was that he’d went his own way, never conforming completely to the society that we lived in.

  CHAPTER 5

  “This is stupid,” Kelle announces as we stand in the holotorium, watching the waterfall drain millions of gallons of three-dimensional water per second into the lake a thousand meters below.

  The sounds are right, I assume, since I’ve never seen a waterfall in anything but an archive image, but everything else is wrong. The hours we spent under the blue skies earlier have jaded us towards the fabrication that the holo presents to us. There is no breeze, no spray of water that we all know should be soaking us if we were really standing on a ledge less than a hundred meters from the falling water. The smells are all wrong too. Instead of the scents we experienced earlier outside of the city, our noses only notice the same stale, hazy air that everyone spends their entire forty breathing in, combined with the odor of bodies packed into an enclosed space.

  “Yeah, let’s go,” Jason says, grabbing my hand, leading me towards the exit.

  Cara and I allow them to guide us back to the outside, all four of us annoyed that we’ve encountered our first disappointment of the day. The pedway lights begin to glow as the sun sets beyond the artificial horizon, one that is a hundred stories high. Heavy shadows blanket the district. Bright lights in unnaturally vivid colors begin flaring to life, transforming the bland building fronts into a garish landscape of advertisements and suggestive beckoning.

  My chron ticks down the seconds while I watch it for a moment, my mind calculating the rest of my time against the activities I still want to do. What I really want is to go back to the hillside and lie with my family under the stars, reciting to Jason the names of stars and the constellations they belong to. I’ve seen the suns of other systems only five times in my entire forty. Five nights in forty years that I can remember the sky clearing after a storm during the night. The images in the archives are nothing like what I witnessed, but when millions of lights keep a city of almost unimaginable size sheltered from the dark, I suppose I was lucky to even see the few that were bright enough to be visible.

  “Tell you what,” I say as we wander aimlessly down the pedway, taking in the constantly changing landscape of the Tidewater district. “You guys decide what you want to do. I’ve done everything I wanted to do today, which is spend it with you, and we even got a couple of hours under blue skies.”

  There’s still a thousand things I want to do, but my mind can’t decide where to begin, and besides, most of them would require more than the hours I have left. The only thing I really want is to spend one more hour alone with Cara. I’ve already had alone time with her today, twice, but I know if I’m not careful, I’ll spend all of my time alone with her, trying to wrap up a decade of dedication, love, and friendship in the span of a day, while at the same time trying to get every last moment of dedication, love, and friendship that she could give me to last for…however long I had from the time I stepped through the portal until my death.

  If I have any time left after stepping through, anyway. For all I know, I might just pop out the other side and into a black vacuum, my instantly frozen corpse quickly getting caught in congestion with the billions of others that have come through for hundreds of years before me, forever nudging each other into eternity.

  Cara looks like she’s about to speak, but says nothing. I can almost hear what she wants to say. I want to tell her I want the same thing, but neither of us are selfish enough to deny our children the few remaining hours they have left with their father.

  “I want a cone,” Jason announces, and begins scanning the buildings and their advertisements for a cone shop.

  “Everyone else?” I ask, looking at the two girls. Both nod, neither smiling, Kelle looking almost murderously at her little brother for not understanding the repercussions surrounding his waste of the dwindling time we have left together. “Cones it is then.”

  We find a shop a block down the street and exit the pedway. Young couples dressed in colorful but skimpy clothing stream past us going both ways as we stop in front of The House of Treats. Cones are definitely a treat, one that can’t be found anywhere within our district, nor any of the surrounding districts. Cara and I splurged after signing our partnership contract, spending the night here in the Tidewater, splurging credits as we sampled all of the things that we’d always heard about but would never experience otherwise. A sugary cone filled with frozen cream and fruit cost half a day’s wages, and Cara and I had scarfed down two each within minutes, suffering an agonizing headache followed by a feeling of euphoria that lasted almost an hour. We’d walked down to the cone shop in the middle of the night to have a third helping each.

  It’s amazing to think how such a little thing like a bit of sugar, batter, real cream, and real fruit is one of the strongest memories I carry in life. The kids have heard us talking about our partnership celebration often enough, mostly because discussions of the cones would be the prominent subject. I’m sure that both of them always took our seemingly exaggerated story of the ‘Night of a Thousand Sensations’ as just that: exaggeration. I smile as the automaton holds out a cone to Jason, knowing he’s about to find out that we weren’t exaggerating at all, and if anything, we were downplaying just how amazing the experience truly is.

  I watch as he takes a tentative lick of the frozen treat, then begins to devour it as if he hasn’t been fed in a year. Cara opens her mouth to warn him, but I shake my head, still smiling. Kelle has her cone now, and is watching the exchange of looks between us, suspicious once again. The three of us watch in awe as Jason exterminates the cone in less than twenty seconds, ours barely having had more than a few licks each. I silently count down in my head from five, and as if on cue, his eyes squint, then shut as both of his hands instantly clamp to the sides of his head.

  “Owwwwwww!” he cries.

  Cara and I burst into laughter, remembering the strange, piercing pain that had felt like a hot spike driven through our foreheads. Kelle watches us with even more suspicion, no longer working on her cone.

  “It’s okay, Honey,” Cara says to her. “That’s just what happens when you eat it too fast.”

  Kelle looks like she’s caught us in a lie, so we begin working on our cones, slowly, steadily, being careful not to tread into the same territory that Jason is just now leaving. By the time Cara and I are almost finished, she’s pecking at hers. Soon the lure of the sweetness, the texture and flavors exploding on her tongue forces her to abandon her caution. I watch her eyes roll up and close as she chews the last bite, knowing exactly how she feels. I’m happy that both of them get to experience it now instead of having to wait another decade or more.

  “More?” I ask. “They are free, today only, and we can have as many as we want.”

  Jason and his sister look at their mom, who of course can’t refuse. I order two more for them, the automaton cheerlessly producing my order within seconds.

  “Two’s the limit,” Cara says with a slight frown, letting them know she’s serious and won’t be argued with.

  We link hands and watch our son and daughter make their treats disappear. If their body reactions are anything like ours were a decade ago, they’ll be bouncing off walls for the next hour or two before crashing out, maybe even needing to be carried from the shuttle to the compartment. We step back onto the pedway after using the sonic sanitizer to remove every trace of sticky goodness from our hands, heading south towards the waterfront. I’m happy once again that such a little thing can create a companion memory to the one Cara and I once shared. It’s one of the things I want the kids to remember when they think of me. Blue skies, the Tidewater and its artificial life that feels more real than what goes on beyond its district borders, the sweet and cold pleasure of a cone. Even the headache that accompanies everyone’s first experience is something I welcome as a memory link for them remember me by.

  I also want them to remember the waterfront. We step off the pedway and onto a walkway that leads to
a pier that stretches over the water for two hundred meters. Half a kilometer away, across the water, is Gem Island, its lights even more flamboyant than the Tidewater’s. The man-made lake’s half-moon shape is as dark as space, soaking in light from the surrounding city. This is one of the few places in the city where the towers don’t impede the view of the sky.

  In our district, even in the Tidewater, I have to look almost straight up from the ground to see the sky. Here, I can see what I imagine to be the sun setting on the real horizon, the permanent haze of the city obscuring any real detail. My mind superimposes images of a sunset and a clear sky from the archives over the drab, washed-out reality.

  “Wow!” Jason exclaims as a dolphin breaks above the surface before diving down again a moment later.

  Seconds later an entire pod of them begin their graceful ascent above the evening waters, their luminescent swirls fading to darkness until they are underwater again. The dolphins know they have an audience of human children they’ve never met before. They follow along in the water as we make our way to the end of the pier. Once there, we descend a wide spiral stairway to a platform that is only a few centimeters above the surface of the lake.

  Stranger friend new friend old greeting new greeting a voice in my head says. I look down at the water to see a dark blue dolphin head poking out of the water, bobbing slightly as it watches us.

  “What is it, Dad?” Kelle asks, her face full of excitement.

  “They talk!” Jason exclaims, and I have to reach down to grab his collar to keep him from trying to jump in the water to hug the dolphin.