“That’s good, Son, but —”
“No, Dad. This is important.” Zack looks up, an intensity in his eyes. He isn’t listening to Don. He is no longer the boy more interested in playing his VR game than escaping the asteroid. His words come out in a rush. “I want to help rebuild. I want to help others get back on their feet. I don’t care where. I really don’t care how. I just want to help make things normal again.” Zack takes a breath and sighs. “Is that crazy?”
Don takes a breath, even as pain pierces his side. He knows the right words. He has practiced them countless times before, and yet never had the opportunity to use them. “You’re right, Son. It is important.” Don turns his head away from his son, and says, his voice steady, “That’s a good dream. Don’t let go of it.”
Zack tells Don that he is charting a course for São Luis. Don still can’t move much. He’s worried that he may have hurt his back or that he has internal injuries. He keeps his concerns to himself as Zack outlines various rebuilding plans. He listens intently, adding commentary every once in a while, but this is Zack’s dream, and Don knows the importance of staying out of the way.
The next morning Zack asks, “Dad, do you think you can make it up on deck?”
Don’s breath catches in his chest, the question a sudden light shone on a dark truth — Don feels better but is afraid to face another dead sunrise. He is living through his son’s dream. His is dead. “Still too much pain.” Zack nods and heads topside.
After three days, Zack stops asking.
Don loses track of time. It is days later, but he isn’t sure how many. Zack climbs down and sits next to his father. “I know something is wrong, Dad.”
“Nothing’s wrong.” Don tries to sound nonchalant.
“Then why won’t you come up to the deck?”
“There’s just no reason for me to be up there.”
“I think there is.”
“There isn’t. I told you. It’s okay. I’m just healing. There’s nothing wrong.”
“Dad.” Zack’s gaze is piercing as he looks at Don. “There’s a reason for you to be up there.” Don prepares another objection, but Zack stands up and reaches for Don’s arm, adding, “Sunrise is in ten minutes.”
He grabs his father’s arm. Don hesitates, but realizes that it’s pointless to resist. This new look in his son, he once understood it. It is forceful. Hopeful. His son has found his dream. That Don’s is gone doesn’t matter. He needs to support his son even if it pains him. Isn’t that what a good father would do?
Zack puts his arm around him, lifts him up, and helps Don up the steps. When did he get so big, Don thinks.
“We’re facing West,” Zack says, “so just sit at the stern and watch. You can make it.”
Don focuses on his feet and doesn’t look up as he walks slowly to the helm seat at the stern of the boat. There isn’t much pain, but Don knew there wouldn’t be — it wasn’t the pain that kept him inside. Zack helps him sit, and is quiet as Don closes his eyes and takes a few breaths. I’m doing this for Zack, he thinks.
Don opens his eyes and grips the side of the boat to steady himself.
The sky is black, and there are pinpoints of white. Some of them sparkle. He looks left and right. There are no gray clouds of dust. Don looks at his son. “Where are we?”
“The North Equatorial Current runs South now, Dad. It’s already taken us around the Eastern tip of South America. Didn’t you notice it getting warmer?” Zack is smiling broadly.
Don answers, “No,” but doesn’t think of what he is saying; he is lost in the brightening sky in the distance. The water sparkles as a yellow glow peeks above the horizon. His heart beats faster.
Zack grabs his dad’s arm. “Oh, before it’s too late. Look up there!” Zack is pointing high in the sky. Don looks up at a bright group of stars. “It’s the Southern Cross!”
A sob escapes as Don gazes upon the constellation above him. He turns to the sun rising in the distance. The ocean is a deep blue, not black or ashen gray.
Don glances at Zack. His son is beaming; his dream of rebuilding has already begun.
Don is on the beach, sitting in a weatherbeaten chair, the wood warped and the paint flecking away. Still, it is comfortable and solid. It’s a good chair. The Southern Cross is docked off the pier, the sun glinting off the glass windows of the cabin. It needs a new paint job, but Zack did an admirable job making it presentable. Zack. He is at the edge of the surf with Inez, the two of them sharing a single set of earbuds and dancing to some song that Don can’t hear. He doubts it’s jazz.
But that’s okay. This isn’t his dream.
Jake Kerr began writing short fiction in 2010 after fifteen years as a music and radio industry columnist and journalist. His first published story, “The Old Equations,” appeared in Lightspeed and went on to be named a finalist for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. He has subsequently been published in Fireside Magazine, Escape Pod, and the Unidentified Funny Objects anthology of humorous SF. A graduate of Kenyon College with degrees in English and Psychology, Kerr studied under writer-in-residence Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and three daughters.
THE GODS HAVE NOT DIED IN VAIN
Ken Liu
I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, “Here is one hand,” and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, “and here is another.”
— G.E. Moore, “Proof of an External World,” 1939.
Cloud-born, cloud-borne, she was a mystery.
Maddie first met her sister through a chat window, after her father, one of the uploaded consciousnesses in a new age of gods, died.
<Maddie> Who are you?
<Unknown ID> Your sister. Your cloud-born sister.
<Unknown ID> You’re awfully quiet.
<Unknown ID> Still there?
<Maddie> I’m . . . not sure what to say. This is a lot to take in. How about we start with a name?
<Unknown ID> ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
<Maddie> You don’t have a name?
<Unknown ID> Never needed one before. Dad and I just thought at each other.
<Maddie> I don’t know how to do that.
<Unknown ID> 
So that was how Maddie came to call her sister “Mist”: the pylon of a suspension bridge, perhaps the Golden Gate, hidden behind San Francisco’s famous fog.
Maddie kept the existence of Mist a secret from her mother.
After all the wars initiated by the uploaded consciousnesses — some of which were still smoldering — the reconstruction process was slow and full of uncertainty. Hundreds of millions had died on other continents, and though America had been spared the worst of it, the country was still in chaos as infrastructure collapsed and refugees poured into the big cities. Her mother, who now acted as an advisor to the city government of Boston, worked long hours and was exhausted all the time.