The old man smiled a last smile. “My afterlife would not be so pleasant as yours.”
“How do you know this is all true? What you said about time. How do you know?”
“I’ve seen the telescopic images. Previous missions spread out like pearls across the face of the event, trapped in their final asymptotic approach. They are there still. They will always be there.”
“But how do you know? Maybe it’s just some new propaganda. A lie. Maybe it doesn’t really work that way.”
“What matters is that this ship will be there for all to see, forever. A warning. Long after both our civilizations have come and gone, we will still be visible. Falling forever.”
“It could still be false.”
“But we are good at taking things on faith, you and I. Give me the names.”
“I can’t.”
The old man thought of his daughters. One dark-eyed. The other blue. Gone. Because of boys like this boy. But not this boy, he reminded himself.
The old man looked down at the figure in the chair. He might have been that boy, if circumstances were different. If he’d been raised the way the boy was raised. If he’d seen what he’d seen. The boy was just a pawn in this game.
As was he.
“What is death to those who take their next breath in paradise?” the old man asked. “Where is the
The boy broke into quiet sobs.
The horizon approached, a graphic on the screen. One minute remaining.
“You can still tell me,
—there is still time.
—perhaps they are your friends, perhaps your family.
—do you think they’d protect you?
—they wouldn’t.
—we just need names.
—a few names, and this will all be over. I’ll end it for you before it’s too late.”
The boy closed his eyes. “I won’t.”
His daughters. Because of boys like this boy.
“Why?” the old man asked, honestly confused. “It does not benefit you. You get no paradise.”
The boy stayed silent.
“I take your heaven from you,” the old man said. “You will receive nothing.”
Silence.
“Your loyalty is foolish. Tell me one name, and I will end this.”
“I will not,” the boy said. There were tears on his cheeks.
The old mathematician sighed. He’d never expected this.
“I believe you,” he said, then slashed the boy’s throat.
A single motion, severing the carotid.
The boy’s eyes flashed wide in momentary surprise, then an emotion more complicated. He slumped forward in his bonds.
It was over.
The old man ran a palm over the boy’s eyes, closing them. “May it be what you want it to be,” he said.
He sat down on the floor against the growing gravity.
He stared at the screen as the darkness approached.
The mathematician in him was pleased. A balancing of the equation. “A soldier for a soldier.”
He thought of his daughters, one brown-eyed, the other blue. He tried to hold their faces in his mind, the final thought that he would think forever.
Not the reverse of existence, but its inverse.
And he waited to be right or wrong.
To be judged for his sins or not.
THE OBSERVER
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
And so we went in.
Combat formation, all five of us, me first, face masks on so tight that the edges of our eyes pulled, suits like a second skin. Weapons in both hands, back-ups attached to the wrists and forearms, flash-bangs on our hips.
No shielding, no vehicles, no nothing. Just us, dosed, altered, ready to go.
I wanted to rip something’s head off, and I did, the fury burning in me like lust. The weapons became tools—I wanted up close and I got it, fingers in eyes, fists around tentacles, poking, pulling, yanking—
They bled brown, like soda. Like coffee. Like weak tea.
And they screamed—or at least I think they did.
Or maybe that was just me.
The commanders pulled us out before we could turn on each other, gave us calming drugs, put us back in our chambers for sleep. But we couldn’t sleep.
The adrenaline didn’t stop.
Neither did the fury.
Monica banged her head against the wall until she crushed her own skull.
LaTrice shot up her entire chamber with a back-up she’d hidden between her legs. She took out two MPs and both team members in the chambers beside her before the commander filled the air with some kind of narcotic to wipe her out.
And me. I kept ripping and gouging and pulling and yanking until my fingertips were bone. By then, I hit the circuits inside the door and fried myself.
And woke up here, strapped down against a cold metal bed with no bedclothes. The walls are some kind of brushed steel. I can see my own reflection, blurry, pale-skinned, wild-eyed.
I don’t look like a woman, and I certainly don’t look like me.
And you well know, Doc, that if you unstrap me, I’ll kill the thing reflected in that brushed metal wall.
After I finish with you.
You ask how it feels, and you know you’ll get an answer because of that chip you put in my head.
I can feel it, you know, itching. If I close my eyes, I can picture it, like a gnat, floating in gray matter.
Free my hands and I’ll get it out myself.
Free my hands, and I’ll get us all out of here.
How does it feel?
By it, I assume you mean me. I assume you mean whatever’s left of me.
Here’s how it feels:
There are three parts to me now. The old, remembered part, which doesn’t have a voice. It stands back and watches, appalled, at everything that happens, everything I do.
I can see her too—that remembered part—gangly young woman with athletic prowess and no money. She stands behind the rest of us, wearing the same clothes she wore to the recruiter’s that day—pants with a permanent crease, her best blouse, long hair pulled away from her horsy face.
There are dreams in her eyes—or there were then. Now they’re cloudy, disillusioned, lost.
If you’d just given her the money, let her get the education first, she’d be an officer or an engineer or a goddamn tech soldier.
But you gave her that test—biological predisposition, aggression, sensitivity to certain hormones. You gave her
