Void (The Far Reaches, #2)

by Veronica Roth

Grief wasn’t uncommon among the maintenance staff. No one sought a job on an interstellar transport ship because their life was working out as planned.

“What is it the Jovians say? ‘Joy is the thief of time, and time is the thief of joy’?”

Her striped sneakers squeaked as she walked to the elevator. They were in vogue on Earth when she bought them—a few months ago for her, a few decades ago on Earth. One of their teenage passengers had recently exclaimed over the sneakers being “vintage” and offered to buy them right off her feet.

She had seen passengers with screens buried in their palms, and then suspended over their eyes, and then lighting up their pockets, and then projected directly into their occipital lobes, only for the cycle to begin again, perhaps in a different order. She saw all this in bits and pieces, as she arrived at a planet to pick up passengers or departed it after dropping them off; she saw them as a god might, ageless and detached from the flow of time.

She hadn’t realized when she took this job how it would make her into something other, something distinct from humanity yet still technically human, but it had.

The Maintenance Deck of the ship had become a series of time capsules, with each new crew member bringing relics of their particu...

Warmth bloomed in Ace’s chest. Not everyone enjoyed the trip. They found it tedious, as if the ability to traverse solar systems were not among humanity’s greatest achievements. But Harry Magnussen seemed to appreciate it, as Ace did.

Odd that you could be in the expanse to define all expanses—what the astropoets called the “Big Empty”—and still feel claustrophobic, but the mind was not built to comprehend such endlessness. Humans liked containers.

She let her eyes go a little unfocused, and stretched her arms out wide, and the void became not closeness but distance and depth. An unexplored ocean full of light she couldn’t see.

lot of the staff on the Redundancy had been in one kind of trouble or another before they were hired—why else would someone volunteer to detach themselves from the flow of time for meager pay and shitty accommodations?

No surprise there. Tertio Polaris was the type to refuse himself even harmless indulgences if they weren’t productive in some way.

Everything was Modernist-Futurist now. Well—not “now” anymore. By the time she returned, they would be on to something new, or back to the old.

Ace tried to remember how long she’d been on the Redundancy, in void time. Less than a decade? More? Enough time for a forest to fill in and for a man to grow old and die right under her nose, but what did that even mean out here?

“Keep your promises between your teeth,” she said, and then added: “. . . so you can bite them back as needed.”

Maybe life in the void should have eradicated her faith in humanity. Separation from time tended to do that to people. All the little struggles of people’s lives—and the great ones—became meaningless. Empires fell and rose, governments rebuilt themselves and collapsed, borders shifted, power flowed in and out, and still the Redundancy flew its endless circuit between star systems.

The one thing that was constant was people fucking up what they’d made. But they kept making things, didn’t they? They kept trying. And so did she.

“You lost people, Callisto,” she said. “Big losses. I know. I’ve felt them too. And I almost did this—what you want to do. It feels like . . . like there’s just no point, without them. Out in the void, you know more than most people how insignificant we are. What’s one more bloated body adrift? Just matter converting to matter. Stardust to stardust.”

“Only—out here we’re also impossibly big,” she said. “Bigger than time. We watch kingdoms rise and fall. Names change. Fashions change. A thousand tiny cataclysms pass us by, and we see better than anybody, you know? That all things pass.”

They waited for a long stretch of time. Like a tide receding, or a moon creeping across the sky by fractions too tiny to observe in the moment. An eternity, really, depending on how tiny you allowed time to be. A millisecond was nothing compared to an hour, and an hour was nothing compared to an eon. It was all relative in the void.

I realized that what’s out there is oblivious to us. There’s no menace to it, because there’s no intent. We’re just fragile, and we break sometimes. And time keeps moving. I don’t know. I think it’s comforting—our smallness is comforting to me.”

It was strange how an ache that had persisted for years could just . . . subside. Just like that. Matter not disappearing, just . . . transforming.

But the void was also nothing, and now it contained her entire world. And so all things passed, eventually. Even pain.