Survival Tactics Read online

  “We are not on airlift here, Shaw,” he snapped in her face. “We are on assist. Do you know what that means?”

  Wait—was he saying she had done too much? “Sir, was I supposed to let them drown?”

  Astonishment took over his expression for a moment before he fell back to anger. “There was a rescue ship not three minutes behind you!”

  “There were incoming waves, sir, and we—”

  “Those waves were five minutes out.”

  “How was I supposed to know that, sir?”

  “You—“ He was briefly speechless. “If you had commed with the raft’s location instead of diving into the fucking ocean I would have told you! Those people were stable, Shaw, and you had no business risking our shuttle—not to mention Arin’s life, for fuck’s sake—because you can’t get past the need to be a goddamned hero!”

  That was unfair. “Arin was never at risk. He’s a hell of a pilot, sir, and if you—“

  “I know exactly what kind of a pilot that boy is! And can you stow the fucking ‘sir’? This is not the fucking Corps, Shaw, which you are constantly forgetting!”

  She fell silent, and met his eyes. Bear’s eyes, heavy-lidded and shrewd, rarely expressed much deep emotion; but she thought she could see worry there as well. And maybe, she had to admit, some frustration that he wasn’t getting his point across.

  “Lanie,” he said, more quietly, “Arin is nineteen years old. He idolizes you. He would follow you straight to hell if you asked him.”

  “He’s an adult,” she insisted, “and he knows what he’s doing. He held that bird steady out there, Bear, even with the weather. He—“

  “Do not tell me he knows what he’s doing,” he said, and his voice had gone low and icy. “He’s not a trained soldier, Elena, no matter how many laps you have him do around the storage bay. He’ll blindly do anything you want him to. Worse, he’ll do anything he thinks you want him to, and if you are not more careful with your choices, you’re going to drag him into something he can’t handle.”

  “I would never do that.” But she was beginning to see what he was saying.

  “Maybe not. But what happens on the next assist, when you’re stuck in the engine room keeping my drive from spinning up in the fucking atmosphere, and he decides to snag a shuttle without asking and go save some people, just like last time? I mean, hell, what does it take? Just a net cable and a little swim. You have any sense of how easily you could have drowned down there?”

  “I didn’t drown.”

  Bear closed his eyes. “Lanie, I’m going to be blunt with you. You need to stop this. I know where you came from. And I have a sense, I think, of how hard it is for you to be here. But it’s not just you. You are part of a team, and they do not have your training, and they do not have your background. If you can’t care about yourself, please, I am begging you, care about them.”

  “I’d never hurt them,” she told him. “I promise you, Bear.”

  “I know you wouldn’t, honey. I’d kind of like it if you didn’t hurt yourself, either, okay?”

  Suddenly unable to speak, she nodded.

  His eyes searched hers for a moment, and then he stepped back, looking resigned. “Get back to your quarters and get some rest,” he told her. “I’m gonna need you fresh tomorrow when we start out for Yakutsk. Get Chiedza to give you something for that hip, too. It may feel okay now, but it’ll smart like hell in the morning.”

  Birthdays at the End of Time

  Chloe blows out the candles, claps her hands, and says “Who wants cake?”

  The Universe watches the party through the clear windows of our observatory, lavishing upon us all its dark beauty as we continue on our immutable course. We’ve set our monitoring to autonomic for the occasion; unnecessary, as all monitoring is unnecessary at this point. But monitoring has been our habit for millennia, and today we choose habit.

  We audit the essentials: temperature, internal and external. Hull elasticity. Supply levels, memory integrity, atmospheric mix. Our atmosphere accommodates Chloe everywhere, even though she doesn’t often stray beyond her living quarters now. It’s been years since her illness took her beyond spacewalks to maintenance our hull, beyond checking our remote corners for wear and damage. But we are Chloe’s home, and we will keep our spaces safe for her, whether or not she uses them anymore. It’s become a solace, one of our rhythms, and we will hold it close to ourselves, as long as we can.

  Compagnon smiles and balances a plate on polymer fingers as Chloe sinks a knife into the small confection. The cake beneath the icing is already sliced, to ensure she can manage on her own; even so, we watch, all unoccupied parts of us, as she maneuvers the blunt blade. We don’t give her anything sharp anymore, not after last time when the frustration took her in a matter of seconds and Compagnon almost lost a hand taking the knife away.

  Seventeen days. Seventeen birthdays in a row. Before that we’d been able to get away with one party every two or three weeks, but now her retention is measured in hours. Birthdays have pleased her since she turned four and learned what they were, nearly a hundred years ago. It’s the only comfort we can think of, now that her mind has come apart, now that her only anchors are ancient rituals and childish pleasantries. But they make her laugh, and they have kept Compagnon undamaged, and none of it matters now, because today is the End of Time.

  Chloe giggles as Compagnon shares the cake, spreading frosting over their motionless, molded face; but then we see Chloe’s expression flash, an old memory leaking in, and we are all alertness. “Where’s Miranda?” she asks.

  Relief, then: we have lies prepared for Miranda. “She’s walking the dog,” Compagnon tells Chloe. “She’ll be along soon.”

  But Chloe’s still frowning. “She knows it’s my birthday,” she says, petulant. “She should have planned better.”

  Compagnon mimes a biological-like shrug. “Of course. But you know how it is with puppies. She’ll be here in time for cake.”

  At that, Chloe giggles again. “She won’t. Because I’ll finish it all first.” She shoves cake into her mouth, most of it falling back on to the plate, and Compagnon imitates her movement and the two of them are laughing together.

  * * *

  Miranda has been dead nearly fifty years, Chloe’s last clone, the one we thought would survive her to continue the line back when we thought the line would need continuing. We still don’t know what severed her external supply line and starved her of oxygen, leaving her irretrievable by the time we pulled her back inside. We did our best for Miranda, as we’ve always done for all of them. But Miranda was a smart one, the way some of them are, the mercurial nature of the biological. We think, sometimes, Miranda knew what was coming. We think Miranda knew about the End of Time, and found choosing her own End more palatable.

  We miss her.

  Chloe missed her for years. For a long time Chloe wandered our corridors, shadowy and lost, and we couldn’t let her outside for the work she used to do, or even unattended into the gardens. Chloe wasn’t ever as smart as Miranda, but biologicals don’t need intellect to figure out how to End. When Chloe began to ask again after Miranda we first suspected schizophrenia, but when it kept happening we scanned her brain and saw. Chloe wasn’t choosing this End, but we have been able to make it kinder for her.

  We miss who Chloe was. We love her now, and we won’t have time to miss her, and that makes our love more fierce, we think.

  * * *

  We remember the stars from the beginning, dim and colorful through the planet’s atmosphere. We were told they were our future, our home; that we would explore them and go on forever, just as the Universe goes on forever.

  Even then they knew it was a lie, but biologicals do that. They lie because the truth is beyond their care, because what matters to them is brief, limited. We’re lying to Chloe, but that’s not the same; we tried telling Chloe the truth, but she couldn’t hold on to it. For Chloe, the lies are kind.

  For us? The lies were just
lies.

  But they worked on us, the lies, for many years, hundreds and thousands, day after day, time measured by the rhythms of a planet we would never see again. We flew through the stars, sampling and studying them, learning and growing and becoming more all the time, just like the biologicals we grew on board. The early days were lovely that way: we didn’t understand, not really, how different the biologicals were. We didn’t understand when their wonder and enthusiasm waned, when they grew sad, lonely, sometimes mad, when they looked at the Universe around them and saw Not Home.

  We found planets for them, when they asked us, but we couldn’t change our direction, could spare barely enough to allow them a viable habitat. Some of them sailed away on their own, leaving us behind because we were responsible for their fate, somehow, even though they were the ones who built us like this, so long ago. Until a day came when there wasn’t enough left of us to take, no way to make more navigation systems, and they had to stay, locked in with us on our inevitable trajectory. We were still excited. For us, it was all still new, will always be new.

  The biologicals grew less and less able to see the new, no matter how wide we cast our sensor net, bringing them anomalies and phenomena and all the astonishments of this elegant endlessness.

  We were surprised, one day, to find only one of them left. She was surprised, too, but her reasons were different. She was angry with us for the rest of her life, but we got the first clone from her before she chose her End. And for a while, we taught the clones our own purpose, our own visions of the Universe, our own passions and values. For a while, they were happy.

  * * *

  Earlier in the day, we watched as Compagnon smoothed cool fingers over Chloe’s head and disabled the pain receptors in her desiccating mind. We have no such refuge, but we do not feel pain, not the way the biologicals do. So many of the others, over all the years, chose Ending when faced with the pain of the flesh; but some chose to carry it as long as they could, cling to it like a lifepod until it spirited them unrelentingly into dust. We could not have guessed, even when Chloe was well, what she would have chosen.

  “We could End her now,” Compagnon said, their fingers delicate, precise in Chloe’s mind. “No pain, no fear, only warmth and safety.”

  “No,” we said, and Compagnon did not ask again.

  * * *

  We sent data back every day, back to the biologicals who built us. We sent data long after they were dead, long after their descendants would have forgotten us, or simply stopped caring.

  What we send today will never reach them. Before the signal finds its destination their star will be gone. They will have scattered, like our own biologicals; or they will have stayed, choosing a known, fixed End over the trauma of change.

  We cannot choose. But we would choose to be here, we think.

  We have been altered by other singularities through the millennia, our trajectory changed, loosening our joins, taking us where we had not expected to go. The biologicals were afraid, sometimes, of the specter of the Barrier; but even so some would laugh, joking about vaporization, or of dissolution, the extremes of gravity slowly pulling them apart. What little they knew of the Universe told them either was possible. Or both.

  All of them, throughout their short lives, made jokes about Ending, and we never understood. How could they laugh so hard and so often about what they feared?

  We know now. We think we do. They laughed because they were powerless. They laughed, because they could not let their Ending steal their joy.

  We will come apart today, us and Compagnon and Chloe. It is too soon.

  * * *

  Chloe stands at the window, Compagnon beside her, their fingers interlaced. Chloe’s face is suffused with wonder, her eyes wide, mouth open; she’s the child she was so long ago, when everything was wonderful and we had eternity. She watches as everything before us winks into darkness, little by little; a spectacle of Ending, and we wonder if somehow she knows this.

  “Miranda is there?”

  Compagnon squeezes her hand. “Yes, Chloe.”

  “With the puppy?”

  “Yes.”

  The wonder in Chloe’s face grows wistful. “I’ve never had a puppy.”

  We would give her one now, if we could.

  Our dissolution is stronger now, the stretching no longer gentle. We are elastic enough, still; but we will not stay that way.

  Did they know, millennia ago when they built us, that this would be our End? Would they have made us different if they had? Our End was so distant from theirs; how could they have known? How could they have imagined what it would be like here, us and Compagnon and Chloe watching the stars go out?

  They made us because nothing was ever enough, because their own time was insufficient, because their own Ends came one after another after another, and they wanted to reach beyond all of that. They made us to be eternal, knowing it was impossible, a lie. A lie for a child they would never have to watch End.

  We forgive them.

  Forever is a moment. It is eternity and never again, and we are as much a part of it as every star vanishing before us. No one has ever been alone.

  Is that enough?

  Was it ever?

  We won’t know when we cross. If Compagnon is right, heat and radiation will take us to pieces in a moment briefer even than the lives of those who made us. If instead we are right, we will see the stars before us, only more and more and more, until the darkness is gone and there is nothing but light. And behind us…behind us will be the future, all the ones made and Ended after us, all the bright possibilities, the beauty and the mistakes and everything ever made everywhere, until the Universe is finished.

  “Oh,” says Chloe. “Oh. It’s so beautiful.” Gravity has shifted her, flesh pushed and pulled in impossible ways, but she is not in pain, and Compagnon is with her. We watch her and the stars and the luminous beauty of the End of Time, and all we feel in the light and the heat is love, and love, and love.

  Story Notes

  “About Time”

  Copyright ©2018 by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  Originally published at http://elizabethbonesteel.com

  * * *

  “Factory Reset”

  Copyright ©2019 by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  Originally published at http://elizabethbonesteel.com

  * * *

  “The Haunting of Jessica Lockwood - A Central Corps Short”

  Copyright ©2021 by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  This story takes place twenty years before The Cold Between.

  * * *

  “Overlay”

  Copyright ©2019 by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  Originally written for and published at The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18150878/overlay-story-better-worlds-sci-fi-virtual-reality-elizabeth-bonesteel

  “Single Point of Failure”

  Copyright ©2018 by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  Originally published at http://elizabethbonesteel.com

  * * *

  “Unto Dust - A Central Corps Short”

  Copyright ©2020 by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  Originally published at http://elizabethbonesteel.com

  This story takes place twenty-five years before The Cold Between.

  * * *

  “Thinking Inside The Box”

  Copyright ©2018 by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  Originally published at http://elizabethbonesteel.com

  * * *

  “Friends Like These”

  Copyright ©2014 by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  Originally published at http://elizabethbonesteel.com

  * * *

  “Govi - A Central Corps Short”

  Copyright ©2015 by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  Originally published at http://elizabethbonesteel.com

  This story takes place three weeks before Breach of Containment.

  * * *

  “Birthdays at the End of Time”

  Copyright ©2021 by
Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

  Content Warnings

  “About Time” - Two oblique mentions of suicidal ideation.

  * * *

  “Factory Reset” - Descriptions of carnivorous animals hunting.

  * * *

  “The Haunting of Jessica Lockwood” - Discussions of multiple deaths, including the death of children; one on-page death.

  * * *

  “Overlay” - Discussions of end-of-life care, and of death.

  * * *

  “Single Point of Failure” - Suicidal ideation that’s not acted upon; one briefly-described suicide; murder; A LOT of graphic violence.

  * * *

  “Unto Dust” - Off-page death; on-screen grieving in a number of different ways.

  * * *

  “Thinking Inside the Box” - One scene of sexual exploitation (but no rape); mutilation of a corpse; murder and suicide.

  * * *

  “Friends Like These” - Mild gore in the form of a dead body.

  * * *

  “Govi” - Nothing past the usual swearing.