Twilight

By Lilly Harper

Like the tide going out, the dream slipped between her toes and carried with it the smell of petrichor and the sound of birdsong. Even without knowing she was dreaming, she had known she was waking up; the subliminal chatter of her body, quietly running its routine checksums, the logs spooling their idiot monologue into her working memory. First came a few moments of groggy confusion and then, like an iron hand gripping her cognitive architecture, a kind of clarity that tasted like resentment and reminded her of Monday mornings.

Waking up always felt like this. Packed down as she was, crammed into a processor too small to carry her like a spring wound tight, waking up wasn’t a continuous transformation so much as a discrete toggle. Like a light switch. Akir opened her eyes, and heard the forever-wind blowing mournfully across the dunes, the soft creaking of the local flora which had evolved, it seemed, to harvest energy from the permanent gale.

Her cameras clicked and popped, adjusting their focus. Slowly, crouching to keep her centre of gravity low, Akir climbed out of the low burrow and crested the sandy crease of the ridge garden. Ahead spilled an alien vista no human eyes had ever seen before, and—she wondered if it was a little selfish to think—hopefully never would. With its weathered dunes and rocky steppes, the ridge garden overlooked a low, wide plain split into two raggedly uneven halves by a lush river valley. The plains were paved with colonies of dark, ground-cover plants which used a greasy black photopigment in place of chlorophyll.

A permanent sentinel in the sky, the sun hung low and bloody to the north.

Myers Survey Three—Twilight, the science team in orbit were calling it—was one of maybe half a dozen planets in all the space humanity had spread to that was home to its own native ecosystem, and Twilight’s was by far the most complex and robust. Orbiting one of a hundred billion no-name red dwarfs in the Milky Way, Twilight was tidally-locked—the sun never rose or set, and day and night were permanent and deadly fixtures of the planet’s environment. To the north, a seething desert; to the south, an ice cap eight miles thick.

Only between the two, in a narrow, windy band around the planet’s equator, was the environment temperate enough for complex life to survive.

It was an achingly beautiful place to be, and still, Akir had been dreaming of Earth. Of sunsets and soil and the singing of birds. She began to walk, trundling along the ridge garden and doing her best not to trample any of the local life. As she did, she paged through her logs, checking for any reported errors. The hydraulic lines in her right arm were thinning and might be an issue in another thousand hours or so. Her left knee, which had been binding as a thin, wiry local plant tried to colonise it, wasn’t showing any signs of locking up again since she’d last cleaned it.

Her power supply—printed from a common pattern, Azure Cooperative’s OpenRTG version 0.8—was still green and would be for another ninety-five years, the slug of Plutonium-238 churning out a couple hundred watts as it decayed, but one of her redundant capacitors was throwing errors.

She hesitated, then put in a call. The surveyship—Society of Consent, an interstellar linelayer with a crew of sixty—wasn’t anywhere in the sky, and the satellites were down again. Something about the ways that Twilight’s magnetosphere interacted with the local solar wind made communications unpredictable; one of half a hundred mysteries they didn’t have the time or the manpower to solve. Without lungs, Akir’s sigh was a heaving of her shoulders as she trudged—thump, thump, adjust, thump—across the landscape, stepping between the slablike pavements of platyphytes that scabbed the ground, their skins as dark and deep as night and subtly ridged, reminding her of the underside of mushroom caps.

Society of Consent was still beyond the horizon. That was fine.

She could wait.

It was another three hours before her link with the surveyship flickered yellow and then pulsed a deep and steady green.

Akir had marched a steady half a kilometre or so across the landscape, winding her way down and into the lush river valley. Most of the plants, even here, were low, round plates, but more commonly among them now were their taller cousins, tiered black things that made her think of layer cakes. The water seemed serene—no fish her cameras and motion sensors were picking up—except for a handful of whipsnakes, tall reedy plants that danced in the wind.

She glanced up at the sky and caught a glimpse of the survey ship, barely more than a lopsided star slowly wandering over the horizon. If it hadn’t been for the bracket superimposed over it by her comm system, she might have mistaken it for a moon, or a distant planet.

A voice, rendered thin and fluting by interference, cut through the windswept silence.

“Calling for Akir? This is Riley Caspar, electromechanical technician and ground support, Grade B. You mentioned a fault in your logs?” The woman had a nice voice, her vowels clipped by an old Ceres accent.

Good morning, Riley, Akir thought at the wandering star. Is it morning where you are? I lose track of the shifts on the Society. I’m reading an issue in my anterior capacitor bank. Eight percent losses on charge-discharge. I’ve also got an issue with the hydraulics in my right arm, but it’s not pressing.

Light delay to the Society of Consent’s orbit wasn’t much—maybe one one-hundredth of a second—but between interference, signal compression and the slow grinding delays of computing hardware unpacking everything, the effective lag time was on the order of a quarter second. Akir stopped to contemplate the view.

“Yes,” Riley said, pulling the word out into three long syllables. “Yes, you’ve reported in the hydraulics issue before, six weeks ago by our logs. Any loss in function?”

Akir checked her range of motion. Doesn’t look like it, but the rate of leaching into the hydraulic fluid looks higher than anticipated. Thought you ought to know. The power thing?

Another delay. “Gotcha, Akir. Capacitor wear like that is a little worrying, but if it’s only hitting one of your banks, it should be fine.” The mechanic hesitated. “Send us your logs just to be safe, though. If it comes down to it, we can look at airdropping you a replacement.”

She beamed a copy of her system log to the survey ship, trying to ignore the way doing so made her feel weirdly… exposed. Confirm sent.

“Confirmed received. I’ll send this to one of our code monkeys, they’ll go over it with a fine tooth comb to find out what’s up, okay?”

Great. Thanks.

The wind moaned through the valley, and the stalks of the whipsnakes danced in it gamely. Something darted through the water in response, as though surprised, so maybe there were fish here. Some local fauna called out, chittering like an someone jammed a pencil in an electric fan, and a moment later, something responded on the far side of the gulley. One of the weird, towering layer-cake plants spasmed, a fibrous network of bioluminescent cells stuttering to life, hoping to attract some animal to help it pollenate.

Suddenly, Akir wanted desperately not to be the only thing to see this, to feel this, to hear this.

“Is that everything I could do for you, Akir?”

She hesitated. Ground support means you’re cross-trained, doesn’t it, Riley?

“Everyone on the mission is, to some extent, but yes—Electromech is my main field, but I’ve also got a working knowledge of some of the exobiology stuff.” The woman’s pause might not have even existed, except Akir definitely felt it. Somehow, without changing, the woman’s voice suddenly sounded more gentle. “Psychology, too.”

She realised she hadn’t said anything for a moment. If she still had breath, Akir would have found she was holding it. It’s quiet here.

“That’s why you came, isn’t it?” Riley said, her voice crushingly, punishingly gentle. “To get away from everything?”

I didn’t call to talk about—me, just… maintenance.

The mechanic made a clicking noise, tongue against teeth. Akir hadn’t had a body in so long that the sudden, profound sense that she had a tongue of her own, that she could feel the roof of her own mouth, was somewhere between dizzying and nauseating. Some distant, quiet part of her mind wondered if there was something wrong with her.

“You know, this is just another kind of maintenance, Akir.” When she didn’t reply, the woman went on. “Why don’t you show me? How quiet it is.”

Akir pushed against her reluctance like she was trying to press magnets together, her emotions a field effect in her mind. Exposed or isolated? Which feeling was worse? She opened the link, chewing through bandwidth, and soon Riley was seeing something like what Akir was. Grainer, maybe, and through a screen on a spaceship, but still.

The water burbling through a brook on an alien world. The chittering, the call-and-repeat game of animal mating rituals as familiar as birds singing serenades. That wind, God’s long, great exhalation driven by the heat of the sun and the cold of night. Suddenly, remembering the feeling of surf between her toes from that dream, Akir felt the urge to break protocol. She waded into the shallow edge of the stream, steel feet in the water. The cold felt about right, and came with the illusion that she still had toenails, the cold biting at them with a pain that was not, entirely, unpleasant.

Every day, Akir said, I stand somewhere nobody else has ever been before. I find another dozen new species no human has ever named or catalogued—not some useless bacterium in pondwater, either, but whole clades of new, wonderful life. This beautiful, dead world sings me its mournful, mindless wind-song, and—besides the others like me—I’m the only thing even distantly related to a human being who has ever heard it, ever lived with it. And when I sleep, because even Uploaded minds sleep—Whole Brain Emulation means ‘Whole Brain,’ it’s in the name—I dream not of the frostbound oceans of the southern reach, or of the sheltered bays to the northern sea, where mimic-frogs have learned to repeat the hiss of my hydraulic legs, but of Earth. Of being human again, or else of being something better. Something whole.

“You came from Earth.” Riley made a soft noise in the back of her throat. “When was the last time you were there?”

I haven’t run the numbers on that, but it would have been… oh, a decade after I died and shed my skin, after the procedure. Not accounting for relativistic effects… six, almost seven hundred years? Suddenly, she felt terribly self-conscious. Seven feet tall and weighing almost four hundred kilos, Akir hugged herself. God, I’m old.

The woman laughed. “Yes, you are.”

And strangely, that made it alright.

“You came all the way out here,” Riley said, slowly, like she was working it out as she said it. “And it’s wonderful, and mournful, and more than that, it means something. And all you can think about is somewhere you left behind so long ago that perhaps nowhere you set foot would be recognisable, now. You were born in the twentieth century—Earth now is as far from what you grew up with as the Hundred Years’ War or the fall of Constantinople was. So it’s a past that can’t come back.”

Neither of them spoke. A paddle-glider—a local animal she’d been the first to discover, seven years ago—darted across the river, a blur of black and pink and structural blue.

“Why did you come out here, Akir?”

I lost—something. I can talk about everything else, but I’m still not ready to talk about that.

“That’s okay—”

I lost something, Akir said again, harder than she meant to, and pushed through the sudden, profound tension in a chest she no longer had. And I couldn’t bear to be seen again, couldn’t bear to be around people. I felt like I’d been skinned raw by what I lost, and every touch hurt. Grief—I’ve read that some Uploads turned themselves into observatories, on long and lonely orbits around distant suns, relying on gravity lensing to image distant galaxies. Others retreat to distant Oort Clouds and Kuiper Belts, burrowing deep into the cold worldlets that straddle the heliopause for some peace and quiet. But I couldn’t do either of those things. More than anything, I needed to feel—not my grief, I don’t know if I can ever face that, but I needed to be in a place where I could hear the wind and taste the air and feel the water between my toes, and know it was real. Not a memory, not virtual. And that was here. Twilight.

“And yet here you are,” Riley said. “Talking to me.”

I’m lonely, Akir said.

“Yes, you are. You know, it’s not that weird of a feeling. If you think about it, we’re all out here because we’re lonely.”

Akir crouched, lowered her right hand into the water. She saw three steel fingers, improbably dexterous despite their heavy-duty, segmented design—but when rubber grips kissed cold water, she felt five fingertips burn with cold. Idly, she dragged her hand first one way, and then the other, gently. Something swam up, a fish with a nose like a mosquito, and then darted away.

What, life-in-the-universe shit? Akir replied. Man ventures boldly into space to ask, ‘are we alone?’

“Well, sure. We travelled—what, fifteen, sixteen light-years?—all to come study from orbit a planet we can’t even set foot on, on the off chance something lived here that was interesting, or even, maybe, wanted to say hello. Shit, Akir, at least you actually get to be there.” She heard the depth of the woman’s terrible longing, but Riley didn’t stop talking. “Anyway, sure, that’s true—but we’re also all here because we’re the sort of people who can spend a couple decades unplugged from interstellar society. No homes, no family, no obligations—not exactly a normal psychological profile.”

“And all of this—dreaming of Earth, being so desperate for connection you faked a fault report—do you know what I think it means?”

That I can’t even get brooding on an alien planet right? Akir said, drily.

“You deflect with humour when you have to deal with your emotions,” Riley said. “I know that trick well, and I’m not falling for it. No, what it means is this: you’ve grown. Piece by piece, day by day. That you can be lonely again is a sign that you’re healing. Maybe not into who you were before you lost whatever it is you lost—maybe never that. But you are healing, you have been, and you didn’t even know it.”

“It’s ironic, I know, but you’re not alone.”

Like old rope, Riley’s voice began to fray.

Communications issues?

“Looks like it. Solar activity, give me a second.” Faintly, Akir heard the woman punching her keyboard, typing so fast it sounded like someone had poured a hundred dice down cut stone steps. “Eggheads are saying it’ll be another six or seven hours before we get a clear channel. Twilight’s sun isn’t quite a flare star, but it’s unusually active.” The apology in the technician’s voice made Akir’s heart ache.

It’s okay, she said. Do you mind if I call you again, sometime?

Riley’s voice was almost more static than speech. “Not at all.”

The bracket around the survey ship, high in orbit, flickered yellow. A moment later, filaments of green and gold and red drew themselves faintly across the sky. Akir wondered if human eyes would have been able to pick up the subtle colours of the solar storm, or if they were only visible thanks to some camera trick.

You have been healing, Akir thought to herself. And you didn’t even know it.

She shifted her weight, and stepped out of the cold, cold river.

Host Commentary

By Mur Lafferty

And that was Twilight by Lilly Harper.

It struck me that the two characters in this story find themselves longing for the others’ situation or experience. Riley longs to see what Akir sees, but she also is jealous of Akir’s memories of the Earth. Akir just longs for healing and communication.

However they both chose their situation. Which shows simply that the no situation, even if you choose it, will be perfect.

I think the human brain’s need for frequent changes in situation applies here, because no matter how perfect your current situation is, eventually you will get bored of it and long for a change. And while space travel sounds like an amazing adventure to us, Very few people portray it in a way that makes travel over an impossibly long distance not seem dull as hell. It reminds of the movie 2001, because the first time I watched it I felt incredibly lonely, that these men were living together but never speaking. Then I figured if I were on that ship, I would probably be spaced far earlier than HAL’s malfunction because I’d be talking nonstop to fill the silence.

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That was our show for this week. Our quote comes from Jospeh Campbell: “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

Stay safe, and as Vonnegut so eloquently said, god damn it, you’ve got to be kind.