Sunward

by William Alexander

Why invent a horrible story even worse than the genuinely horrible thing that already happened? she asked. I don’t know, I said. Maybe it feels better to pretend that they understand what’s going on. Living with uncertainty is hard.

Bone-white hair cut in a style common to Venusian sailors. I guessed that she hailed from one of the cloud cities and had done a tour of naval duty before the specialists recruited her. Venus made good sailors. They have to be good. Ships that drift below those acidic clouds tend to melt before hitting the ground.

I heard the ding of an impact against the diamond shield. It was definitely a pebble. Pieces of metallic debris make a different noise. The chances of hitting that tiny rock were vanishingly small—just like the rock itself, which had now vanished in a little puff of even smaller pieces. Given the vast amount of emptiness that both objects had been moving through, the math made impact look impossible. It wasn’t, though. We still hit the pebble. That collision had become a fact, and not just a fractional possibility. After something happens, the probability of it happening is one.

“Done.” Hayall took a notebook from his pocket and scribbled on it. Then he tore out the page, handed it off to a passing subordinate, and stuck the notebook back in his pocket. The man was a true courier. He trusted paper trails rather than the torrents of the stream.

Preconscious algorithms periodically threaten to bury authors beneath an avalanche of debased language reduced to gray goo. Such regurgitating formulae are capable of churning out words like factory-baked slices of fungal bread, devoid of understanding or communion.”

“You can’t read their minds.” “We can, though,” he said. “No!” I wasn’t whispering anymore. “You can’t, because that freezes the flow of memory and thought to make it legible from the outside. It would bring their whole sense of self to a crashing halt. It’s horrible. They may never recover.”

That is an old story, I admitted. Meat versus metal. Parents afraid of getting displaced by their kids. Old gods trying to swallow all the new ones. But maybe it’s not the only story that we know how to tell.