It took some months to accept my luck. I’d met someone else who liked to hike more than most people like to sleep. It boggled me that a woman who looked like her would also be aroused by Latin nomenclature. Weirdest luck of all, she laughed at my jokes, even when I didn’t know I was making one.
The fit between us was rough but useful. I gave her stamina and fed her curiosity. She taught me optimism and appetite, albeit plant-based. There it was: roll the dice and find your life catalyzed by another, one who, ten minutes later or three seats farther down at another computer screen, would have remained an undetected signal from deep space.
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ALYSSA FINISHED HER JD as I wrapped up my doctorate. And still our streak kept rolling. We both landed decent jobs in the same unlikely city. Madtown, Cheeseland: from U Dub to U Double U. A place on neither of our radars soon made natives of us. We loved the city, and our only contention was east side or west. We found a place near Lake Monona, a healthy walk from campus. It was a good house, a little dowdy, a little old—pine-framed midwestern standard issue, renovated many times, with leaks around the flashing of the skylights. It was just right for two. It got snugger later, with three. Later still, with two again, it would feel cavernous.
Aly was a dynamo, cranking out fully researched action plans for one of the country’s leading animal rights NGOs every other week while dashing off countless diplomatic emails and press releases in her spare minutes. In four years, she rose through the ranks from glorified fundraiser to Midwest coordinator. State legislators from Bismarck to Columbus both dreaded and adored her. She inched ahead on colorful profanity and sardonic cheer. The vilest factory farm brought out her steely will. Between occasional full-on collapses of confidence, her days remained as resolute as they were long. At night, there was red wine and poems for Chester.
Wisconsin gave me my first real home. I found a collaborator. Stryker handled the astrochemistry that was beyond me. I contributed the life science. Together, we studied how the absorption lines in the spectra of distant atmospheres might reveal biology. We refined our biosignature models by applying them to terrestrial satellite data, scaled down to what Earth would look like if spied on by a four-meter telescope from distant space. We learned to read its fluctuating images. In the shimmer of data points we detected the planet’s makeup, calculated its cycling elements, watched the bright continents and swirling currents of ocean. The harsh Sahara and fertile Amazon, mirror-like ice sheets and changing temperate forests: all appeared in the fluctuations of a few pixels. It thrilled me to peer through that narrow keyhole on the breathing Earth and see it the way alien astrobiologists would from a trillion miles away.
We had lucky days, lots of them. Then the climate in Washington changed and funding fell off. The great telescopes we needed—the ones that would give us real data to run through our models—slipped and missed their development deadlines. But there I was, still getting paid to prepare how to discover whether we were alone or surrounded by crazy neighbors.
Aly and I had more projects than we had hours. Then our lives changed, thanks to the one-point-five percent failure rate of our favored birth control. The unlikely roll stunned us both. It seemed a break in our long streak, the worst possible timing for an event we might never have chosen for ourselves. Our careers already stretched us to the limits. Neither of us had the knowledge or wherewithal to raise a child.
A decade later, I see the truth, every morning I wake up. If Aly and I had been in charge, the luckiest thing in my life—the thing that kept me going when all the luck in the world went cold—would never have existed, not even in my wildest models.
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THE FIRST NIGHT HOME was hard on Robin. Our mountain getaway had smashed all routines, and thermodynamics long ago proved that putting things back together is lots harder than taking them apart. He tore through the house, wired and erratic. After dinner, I felt him regressing: eight years old, seven, six… I braced myself for zero, and blastoff.
Can I check my farm?
“You can play for one hour.”
Yesss! Gems?
“No gems. I’m still paying off that last little stunt of yours.”
That was an accident, Dad. I didn’t know your card was on the account. I thought I was getting gems for free.
He did look stricken. If his explanation wasn’t the literal truth, regret had made it truer in the months since the disaster. He played for forty minutes, announcing his trophies as he earned them. I graded homework sets from the lecture course and worked on the edits for Stryker.
Following an especially manic harvesting clickfest, he turned to me. Dad? His shoulders hunched in supplication. Here it was at last—the thing that had nagged him since we got home. Can we watch Mom?
He’d been asking more often in recent weeks, in a way that had grown unhealthy. We’d watched some of her videos too many times, and seeing Aly in action didn’t always have the best effect on Robin. But whatever the clips did to him, forbidding them would have done worse. He needed to study his mother, and he needed me to study her with him.
I let Robin search the video site. After two keystrokes, Alyssa’s name rose to the top of previous searches. I have less than fifteen minutes of video of my own mother. Now the moving, talking dead are everywhere, available anytime, from any pocket. It’s a rare week when we dead-to-be don’t surrender a few more minutes of our souls to the overflowing archives. Not even the craziest SF story from my youth predicted it. Imagine a planet where the past never went away but kept happening again and again, forever. That’s the planet my nine-year-old wanted to live on.
“Let’s see. We need a good one.” I took the mouse and scrolled, looking for a clip that would be gentle with us. Aly was up in my ear, whispering, What in God’s name are you thinking? Don’t let him watch that!
Pulling rank didn’t work. Robin swung in the swivel chair and grabbed the mouse. Not those ones, Dad! Madison. Here.
For the magic to work, the ghost had to be nearby. He needed to see his mother lobbying at the state Capitol, an hour’s walk from our two-bedroom bungalow. He remembered those days—afternoons with Alyssa practicing in the dining room, editing and re-editing her testimony, declaiming away her nerves, all those times he’d watched her don her owl pendant, wolf earrings, and one of three warrior dress suits—black, tan, or navy blazer with knee-length stretchy skirt and cream-colored blouse—then hop on her bike with her dress shoes in a shoulder bag to pedal off to the state assembly and do battle.
This one, Dad. He pointed to a clip of Alyssa testifying for a bill to outlaw killing contests.
“That one’s for later, Robbie. Maybe when you’re ten. How about one of these?” Aly lobbying against something called possum tosses. Aly fighting to protect pigs from abuse during the annual “Pioneer Days.” Rough, too, but cakewalks compared to the one he wanted.
Dad! His force surprised us both. I sat still, certain he’d melt down and turn the evening into a screaming match. I’m not a little kid anymore. We watched the farm one. I was fine with the farm one.
He had not been fine with the farm one. The farm one had been a colossal mistake. Aly’s description of chicks raised on tilted wire mesh, packed so closely they pecked each other to death, had given Robin nighttime screaming fits for weeks.