“Now you have a reason to return,” Hyun-sik said. “Otherwise Kenzou and I will have to face whatever consequences come of this trip alone.”
Saki sighed. They knew her too well. She couldn’t stay in the Chronicle and throw them to the fates. “I promise to return.”
This is a love story, but it does not end with happily ever after. It doesn’t end at all. Your stories are always so rigidly shaped—beginning, middle, end. There are strands of love in your narratives, all neat and tidy in the chaos of reality. Our love is scattered across time and space, without order, without endings.
Visiting the Chronicle in the past was like watching a series of moments in time, but the future held uncertainty. Saki split into a million selves, all separate but tied together by a fragile strand of consciousness, anchored to a single moment but fanning out into possibilities.
She was at the site of the xenoarchaeology warehouse, mostly.
Smaller infinities of herself remained in the control room due to projector malfunction or a last-minute change of heart. In other realities, the warehouse had been relocated, or destroyed, or rebuilt into alien architectures her mind couldn’t fully grasp. She was casting a net of white into the future, disturbing the fabric of the Chronicle before it was even laid down.
Saki focused on the largest set of her infinities, the fraction of herself on New Mars, inside the warehouse and surrounded by alien artifacts. The most probable futures, the ones with the least variation.
M.J. was there, surrounded by a bubble of white where he had disrupted the Chronicle.
Saki focused her attention further, to a single future where they had calibrated their coms through trial and error or intuition or perhaps purely by chance. There was no sound in the Chronicle, but they could communicate.
“Hello, my lifelove,” M.J. messaged.
“I can’t believe it’s really you,” Saki answered. “I missed you so much.”
“Me too. I worried that I’d never see you again.” He gestured to the artifacts. “Did you solve it?”
She nodded. “Nanites. The bases of the artifacts generate nanites, and clouds of them mix with the dust. They consumed everything organic to build the tops of the artifacts.”
“Yes. Everything was buried at first, and the nanites were accustomed to a different kind of organic matter,” M.J. typed. “But they adapted, and they multiplied.”
Saki shuddered. “Why would they make something so terrible?”
“Ah. Like me, you only got part of it.” He gestured at the artifacts that surrounded them. “The iridescent blue on the bottom are the aliens, or a physical shell of them, anyway. The nanites are the way they make connections, transforming other species they encounter into something they themselves can understand.”
“Why didn’t you explain this in your reports?”
“The pieces were there, but I didn’t put it all together until I got to the futures.” He gestured at the warehouse around them with one arm, careful to stay within his already distorted bubble of white.
In this future, she and M.J. were alone, but in many of the others the warehouse was crowded with people. Saki recognized passengers and crew from the ship. They walked among the artifacts with an almost religious air, most of them pausing near one particular artifact, reaching out to touch it.
She sifted through the other futures and found the common threads. The worship of the artifacts, the people of the station living down on the colony, untouched by the nanites. “I don’t understand what happened.”
“Once the aliens realized what they were doing to us, they stopped. They had absorbed our crops, our trees, our pets. Each species into its own artifact.” He turned to face the closest artifact, the one that she’d seen so many people focus their attentions on in parallel futures. “This one holds all the human colonists.”
“They are visiting their loved ones, worshipping their ancestors.”
“Yes.”
“I will come here to visit you.” Saki could see it in the futures. “I was so angry when Li sent drones to record the final moments of the colony. I should have been there to look for you, but that’s a biased reason, too wrong to even mention in a departmental meeting. I couldn’t find you in the drone vids, but there was so much data. Everyone and everything dead, and then systematically taken apart by the nanites. Everyone.”
“It is what taught the aliens to let the rest of humankind go.”
“They didn’t learn! They took all the organics from the probes we sent.”
“New tech, right? Synthetic organics that weren’t in use on the colonies, that the nanites didn’t recognize. You can see the futures, Saki. The colony is absorbed into the artifacts, but at least we save everyone else.”
“We? You can’t go back there. I don’t want to visit an alien shrine of you, I want to stay. I want us to stay.” Saki flailed her arms helplessly, then stared down at her wristband. “I promised Kenzou that I would go back.”
“You have a future to create,” M.J. answered. “Tell Kenzou that I love him. His futures are beautiful.”
“I could save you somehow. Save everyone.” Saki studied the artifacts. “Or I could stay. It doesn’t matter how long I’m here, in the projection room we only flicker for an instant—”
“I came here to wait for you.” M.J. smiled sadly. “Now we’ve had our moment, and I should return to my own time. Go first, my lifelove, so that you don’t have to watch me leave. Live for both of us.”
It was foolish, futile, but Saki reached out to M.J., blurring the Chronicle to white between them. He mirrored her movement, bringing his fingertips to hers. For a moment she thought that they would touch, but coming from such different times, using different projectors—they weren’t quite in sync. His fingertips blurred to white.
She pulled her hand back to her chest, holding it to her heart. She couldn’t bring herself to type goodbye. Instead she did her best to smile through her tears. “I’ll keep studying the alien civilization, like we dreamed.”
He returned her smile, and his eyes were as wet with tears as her own. Before she lost the will to do it, she slapped the button on her wristband. Only then, as she was leaving, did he send his last message, “Goodbye, my lifelove.”
All her selves in all the infinite possible futures collapsed into a single Saki, and she was back in the projection room, tears streaming down her face.
We know you better now. We love you enough to leave you alone.
Saki pulled off her gloves and touched the cool surface of the alien artifact. M.J. was part of this object. All the colonists were. Those first colonists who had lost their lives to make the aliens understand that humankind didn’t want to be forcibly absorbed. Was M.J.’s consciousness still there, a part of something bigger? Saki liked to think so.
With her palm pressed against the artifact, she closed her eyes and focused. They were learning to communicate, slowly over time. It was telling her a story. One side of the story, and the other side was hers.
She knew that she was biased, that her version of reality would be hopelessly flawed and imperfect. That she would not even realize all the things she would not think to write, but she recorded both sides of the story as best she could.
This is a love story, the last of a series of moments when we meet.
ALSO BY JONATHAN STRAHAN
Best Short Novels (2004–2007)