The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

The Gift ^{Julie Nováková}

“Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t make a grave mistake by accepting the Ramakhi gift.” Floriana Bellugi sighed and ran her palm through her hair. I couldn’t tell whether she’d done the gesture absently or arranged it just to seem so. Nothing could be certain about her. “Look at the cohort who’d been adults at that time. How many are still around by now?”

Was this a rhetorical question? But she was looking seriously at me, as if expecting the answer. “The estimates range from 5 to 8 percent. Hard to say more precisely. Too much information latency between the systems, and no tracking is perfect, especially over that amount of time.”

“And for those people,” she added pointedly. “You learn to avoid it over the course of four hundred years.”

It would take a lot of adaptation, though. We haven’t exactly stagnated over that time. But they say learning is a positive feedback loop, and with enough experience and motivation, I could imagine achieving a lot with so much time. I shifted in my seat.

Bellugi noticed, of course. Sensed my impatience. Seemed to approve of it. Cutting right to the matter: “The man I need you to find is one Antonio Arienti. That’s his original name. Born in 1977 in Nashville. His parents also; grandparents were immigrants from Sicily.” I visualized it on the map. “Joined the U.S. Army, promoted quickly, expanded his education, became a fast-track officer. Left to become a private consultant. Spent some time in Myanmar, Chechnya, Indonesia, Angola, and Syria, always shortly before the local conflicts reignited. Strange coincidence.” Bellugi produced a bitter little smile. “By the time the Ramakhi messenger probe arrived, Arienti was retired and living in Paris, though the rumors were he’d sell some ‘lost’ pieces of army equipment from time to time. Arienti somehow managed to be among the first million people who received the gift.”

“Where were you?” I spoke before she could continue.

The slightest change in her expression. Angry? Amused? Wary? My systems told me it was inconclusive.

“In Rome.”

That wasn’t what I was asking.

How many people who had seen the twilight of the twentieth century were still alive today? Ten million? Scattered across the systems. Statistically speaking, fewer than two hundred thousand should be in ours. I was speaking with one. Floriana Bellugi made her long lifespan no secret. She looked fifty to sixty, but then again, most of them did; some even less. Perfectly groomed silvery hair. Composed face with elegant, gentle features. Misleading. A woman out of time. Free of its tyranny.

She picked up her cup of white tea and sipped. “Arienti’s trail disappears in the post-gift uprisings. Emerges again on a ship to Mars. He spent almost a century there. Very quiet, left almost nothing behind beside the bare evidence of his presence. Then Saturn’s clouds for about two decades, under the name of Paul Olivieri. Jumped on the first starship, arrived at Tau Ceti nearly a century later. As soon as the ship to YZ Ceti was ready, he was in. Going by Louis Castello.”

That left us barely a century more. I fished for the list of voyages in my extended memory. He could have gotten here if he took Kensakan to Teegarden’s Star and then, almost instantly, the Eridanus to us, Epsilon Eridani. Why would he?

“Spent over eighty years out there. From what I’ve heard, YZ Ceti is not a great place to live. Violently eruptive star, very scattered material, one planet tidally locked and practically uninhabitable due to the flares, the other freezing. The rest… just rock, ice, and dust. Why they sent colonists there in the first place, I cannot imagine. Probably because it was so close.” Just the slightest hints of contempt in her voice and the curve of her lips.

“So he’s not here.” Then why am I?

“I never said he was. He sent a message over eight years ago. Arrived last year. Not to me. I learned about it, though, made a brief inquiry, and now I’m talking to you.” She once again enjoyed keeping me in the dark just for a moment longer, expecting me to ask more questions. I waited patiently, not giving her the satisfaction.

“It was meant for an associate of his. He was saying he’d change places again, and sent an encrypted data package. The decryption code is meant to be auto-sent with a fifty-year latency.”

“Unbreakable, I suppose.”

“Correct.”

“How large?” I asked.

“More than my history on him.”

“How did you acquire it anyway?” If the transmission arrived less than a year ago, she couldn’t have contacted any other systems and heard back. She must have been tracking him her whole life or hoarding all information on starships’ passengers—not just those coming here. In any case, a remarkable and most terrifying feat.

“I have my sources.”

I know; asking stupid questions… Just to be sure, I tried to access information about her and cross-reference it with her story of Arienti. No match. But the latency was just a microsecond off. She was restricting me, but didn’t want to make it too apparent. Out of deception or politeness?

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go after him.”

I half-suspected it, but still wasn’t fully prepared to think of leaving my home. “Where?”

“He should arrive at van Maanen’s Star in less than a decade. If you leave soon, you’ll be there some twenty years later.”

“He may not be there anymore by then.”

“May not,” she agreed. “But may yes.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Find him. Find out what he’s doing and why. Report to me.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“You will receive further instructions, but they’ll be available when you need them. No need to distract you if they prove obsolete.”

Somehow, she’d transformed during our conversation. She seemed pensive at first, serious; now she acted openly Machiavellian. I took a chance. “Do you think it was a grave mistake?”

“What?”

Had I really taken her by surprise? Or just more layers of pretense?

“Oh. The gift,” Bellugi realized. “What do you think?”

“We may have still been stuck by the old Sol without it,” I said. “Longer lifespans gave us different motivations, the ability to survive a whole interstellar voyage, the drive to invest in long-term projects.”

“Yet most of the First Generation are dead by now. Most of them voluntarily. Refused further treatments or have taken their own lives. How many mistakes, how much boredom, how much loss and disappointment can one stand in a lifetime?”

I took my own cup, finished it, set it aside. “I don’t understand. All of that can be corrected.”

“Then it wouldn’t be you anymore.”

Should outdated concepts surprise me in someone like her? As old as her?

“You had no… identity corrections?”

“You’re asking a highly personal question, little one. But a good one. What kind of people would, in your opinion, be most likely to disregard negative experiences or feelings, or get them erased just like that?”

Anyone, I was going to say but stopped myself soon enough. Or… maybe we’ve just gotten accustomed to their thinking.

“Psychopaths,” I ventured, having fished for the old term she might be most familiar with.

Floriana Bellugi smiled, offered me more tea, and, when I declined, dismissed me. Her assistants would handle the rest, she assured me. It was my first and last face-to-face time with her.

Five months later, I found myself aboard Chrysalis, a small starship bound for van Maanen’s Star.

The whole hospital was celebrating. The new building had opened. Funding for better instruments had been on its way. Doctor Aster Sebai could not have been happier.

She could already see the better future ahead of them. Not for her own sake, but for all the people who had been lining up in front of the hospital from early morning. For all the villagers who couldn’t afford medical care. For those who remembered darker times. Last but not least, for her daughter. Feven was growing up so fast, already nearly an adult! She should arrive from school any moment.

Not everything went smoothly, though. One of the patients came in drunk, nearly staggering into the examining room. His left arm was broken. He cursed and swore while Sebai examined him. He insisted that she give him morphine for the pain.

“There’s no need for that,” she assured him firmly. “The fracture is clean, look at the X-ray image. I’ll give you local anesthesia while I fix the arm.”

“It hurts, you bitch!” he wailed, and the string of expletives continued. Sebai, prepared to defend herself and call for help if necessary, waited until he shut up, and then said calmly: “I can either fix your arm, or not. There is no chance I’m giving you morphine, but right now you decide whether I treat you. If you want to keep calling me names, begging for drugs, and threatening me, go away. Your choice.”

He was silent for a while. Then he nodded, and she finished the dressing. “There,” she smiled. “We’ll leave the cast on for three weeks. By then, the fracture should be healed. Please come again in that time. If there are any problems, come sooner. All right?”

“Yeah,” he said and quickly vanished.

It was the last patient. Feven came in after him and greeted her mother.

Later, she asked: “Why were you so nice to that old drunk? Most doctors would immediately refuse to treat him if he behaved like that, and I wouldn’t think less of them. But you spoke to him nicely, and he didn’t even say thank you.”

“Everyone deserves a chance. Kindness is all, my love,” she smiled. “Remember that.”

Little one, Bellugi had called me back then. I have experienced less than 5 percent of her lifespan. At twenty years old, I was one of the youngest people around. Would that be why she chose me out of all the possible candidates?

“You’re unburdened by decades or centuries of experience. Less prone to conventional thinking. You may still be original,” said her assistant, a small gray-haired woman, when I brought up the topic before my departure.

I disagreed but stayed silent. Bellugi must have had her reasons, mustn’t she?

Would I become stereotypical after four centuries? I doubted the people of her age were that. Those who gave up in the meantime, perhaps. But the survivors? Arienti seemed quite adaptable.

Why else would she pick me? And why this me? Erin Taiwo could be many things. Did not hold reservations about change. Bellugi didn’t want me to change; she went along with the petite girl of curious disposition. Didn’t even want me to get better sensory and memory extensions. She seemed a peculiar woman.

Did she have something to do with the departure of Chrysalis? When I looked it up, I couldn’t find anything about this voyage more than a year ago. Had she pulled some strings to make it happen, after she’d come across Arienti’s message? Was I really her only asset aboard, or just one of many?

A mere two hundred passengers. The scientists and the ever-curious. Or both at once. Van Maanen’s Star, an old white dwarf, did not attract colonists.

Ninety-two of the one hundred and sixty stars within the twenty-light-year radius from Sol are red dwarfs. Thirty-nine are brown dwarfs, if you care to call them stars at all. The rest include some giants running out of fuel, a couple of young bright stars, and eight white dwarfs. Out of these eight, only two had seen crewed expeditions.

If you’re lucky, there are remnants from the original star system you can use for resources or colonization. Sometimes even planetary cores survive the red giant phase. Most humans seem quite happy near main sequence stars. But we are many, and some avoid anything you might call normal.

We spent most of the voyage as sleepers. We were effectively ageless, but we could still starve, suffocate, or fall victim to accidents. Chrysalis woke us from our cocoons upon approaching the inner system. Inner, in this case, closer than Mercury orbits the Sun or Turms our Epsilon Eridani. Much farther out, remnants of two ice giants and smaller bodies orbited the slowly cooling star. Here, a world not much smaller than Venus circled its tiny white sun barely a tenth-au away. Its gravity sent debris from the innermost disk on a crash course with the star. It must be quite a sight when some larger chunk of rock fell upon the face of the star. Viewed from the planet’s dayside, the star looked twice the size of the Sun viewed from Earth, or of Epsilon Eridani observed from my homeworld Turms.

There, on the planet known as van Maanan B, were most of the passengers from the first van Maanen mission, or so we were told by our ship. None had left the system in the two decades that elapsed since their arrival. A blink of an eye for some, I supposed. Most of my life for myself, not counting my sleeper years.

We gathered by the transparent hull section the ship had made for us and observed the scenery—barren, rugged but breathtaking—during our own descent into the planet’s orbit. No impact craters to be seen, I noticed. Strange. How young must the surface be, even though its star is so old?

No one spoke aloud. I could feel the excited hum of conversations going on silently, but I cared little to tap into them. None would contain anything important for my own mission.

How many of my shipmates were also Floriana Bellugi’s? I supposed I would find out when it was favorable to her interests.

I was content with playing pawn until I discovered more. Then, just maybe, I would have enough information for my own agenda. But I was still too young and inexperienced compared to the likes of Bellugi and Arienti. I had to get to know them.

Finding Arienti would be the first thing to do.

The day everything changed started as usual. Aster Sebai made her rounds among the inpatients and noted their progress with satisfaction. Her dream of helping people was coming true.

The shouts and cries from the staff common room interrupted her thoughts. She ran there in fear that something had happened.

Something had.

“Look!” Ruth exclaimed and pointed at the TV screen. At first Aster could hardly comprehend the surrounding awe and excitement. Then the news dawned on her.

An interstellar object of possibly alien origin had been captured….

A hoax, some claimed. End of the world, cried others. Beginning of a Nirvana. Alpha and Omega.

After the initial worldwide uproar calmed, news started trickling down. It’s a robotic probe. It may be endowed with some kind of artificial intelligence. Attempts at communication will ensue. It’s talking to us. It designated itself as “Ramakhi.” It’s speaking for organic beings like us….

Sebai tried to wrap her head around it as the updates kept coming during the following weeks and months. This was the world her daughter, and then her grandchildren, would live in. No longer alone.

The same year, before it shut itself down, the Ramakhi messenger gave humanity the gift.

“Almost everyone lives here in Olympus,” the guide gestured to a gleaming domed structure at the substellar point. They had to level hard rugged terrain before they could build here. But who wouldn’t want a permanent perfect view of the star? Not having stood under a sun besides Epsilon Eridani before, I fell in love with the sight of van Maanen in the sky.

“This is the site of a future city of wonders,” the man continued in an overly dramatic tone. I switched him off and let him run in the background, so that it would appear as though I was still using the orientation procedures for the habitat. No need to produce unexpected patterns.

I went to my assigned room in the freshly printed section for the newcomers and rested a bit, still not used to the higher gravity. I had some gadgets and clothes printed. I went to have a look around, like most of the people, still adhering to the pattern.

I scoured the add-on inflatable sections and the main body of the base. I spent some time on the observation platforms, and headed toward the research facilities. Most of the people who had bothered to travel this far, and who didn’t leave like modern hermits for the sparse little stations outside the planet, ended up here sooner or later. What nobler way was there to spend decades to centuries? Most spent only about a decade on a certain subject, moving on out of the desire for change, but the fields moved forward rapidly. Who knew; perhaps I would devote my life to pursuing scientific challenges as well. I’d have all the time in the world to decide.

I activated the guide again. “Show me the research groups and their members.”

The man obeyed and smiled. “Are you looking for one to join?”

“I hope so.”

Maybe I was following a wrong lead, but what would a man like Arienti do here? Meditate and contemplate his past in one of the hermitage pods? Hardly. Kill time going full tourist? Not his style. Become a trader? Not in this place. He’d spent decades here. He must be pursuing some inquiry.

Proxies of stellar evolution, long-time changes in white dwarf atmospheres, post-main sequence system stability and evolution, surface chemistry of planets after star’s planetary nebula phase, magnetic properties of white dwarfs, conditions for emergence of life on post-MS stars’ planets, distribution of rare metals and their isotopes on the planet’s surface and in the crust…

I stopped there. “Can you lead me to their place?”

The guide’s shining smile became almost annoying. “My pleasure.”

Then it was only a matter of asking a few inconspicuous questions to get to know Arienti’s location. Steering the conversation in the direction I wanted was easy.

“…you probably want Castello’s Castle then,” a man named Tobio, who proved to be a good unsuspecting information source, chuckled. I inclined my head curiously, and he continued: “That’s just a nickname. You’ll know it as Athens. One of the smaller bases out there.”

“Why the nickname?”

I noticed the habitat’s systems whispered no hints to me.

“It was financed by a man named Castello. He seems to live there. Never came back here once the base was established. Hence Castello’s Castle.”

I let a smile play on my lips. “It must be an interesting place, then. I think I’ll pay it a visit.”

It was strange to watch the gifted leave the hospital. Doctor Aster Sebai observed them with mixed feelings. She didn’t work in the gifted section, spanning a part of the previous elderly care ward, but only someone remarkably myopic wouldn’t keep noticing the change. Less than a year after its official approval, the gift was being distributed to randomly chosen citizens who agreed to undergo the procedure. Few had refused.

That morning in the doctors’ mess, there was an unusual buzz. Ruth ran to Aster as soon as she saw her. “Alana has been selected for the gift! Maybe one of our numbers will come up next.”

“Congratulations to her. But we can’t expect anything, it’s a lottery,” Sebai said. She was uncertain if she wanted her number to come up. What would she do, living forever? She was content with her life. Though she didn’t want the option for herself, she hoped her daughter would get to choose.

Of those who refused the procedure, some were paranoid about using insights gained from an alien probe that didn’t know human physiology before it started studying us, some didn’t wish for life everlasting for many reasons. But most wished their number would come up.

“What would you do if you were gifted?” mused Ruth. “I’d take some time off and travel the world.”

“I would continue my work here,” Sebai said dryly. “Those who aren’t gifted still need our help. Not to mention the gifted, who can still become sick or injured, even though they don’t age.”

Ruth scowled at her. “Pessimism doesn’t suit you, Aster.”

“It’s realism. The gift is not a miracle ending all suffering. And for those who become gifted but have no money to speak of, and a family to support, not much really changes.” Sebai would have continued, but her phone beeped. It was Feven, telling her that the office where she worked had been closed for the day for fear of an attack. Sebai’s stomach knotted. It would be so much easier, had the gift really been a miracle….

I’ll drop by the hospital, say hi. Love you, mom.

Sebai went on to make her rounds. Work had always been reassuring to her. For a moment, she could push aside the tensions the gift had sparked, and the risk of plunging into a bloody civil war once again. She still vaguely remembered the images from her childhood, however she wished not to.

A text beeped again. I’m here, mom. Where r u?

Sebai touched the screen to reply. And that was when all turned to dust.

A sudden blast shook the building violently. Sebai staggered and fell. She felt fragments of the wall paint fall on her neck. “Get under the beds!” she managed to shout before a cough got ahold of her. She was blinking fine dust away from her eyes.

The hospital trembled again, and she instinctively rolled under an empty bed.

The third blast came, and the roar of the falling walls deafened her. Then she remembered nothing until waking up in a hastily fashioned mobile infirmary.

When she came to, her entire body was aching and she almost couldn’t hear. But they said she’d only suffered a few broken bones, concussion and dehydration, and had no internal bleeding.

The news of the attack slowly trickled to her. The three bombs completely decimated the hospital; it was nothing but ruins now. A group opposing the current government claimed responsibility for it. They said they’d end the abomination of the gift. That they’d rightfully return the land to its former law. That they had God on their side. That they would make the nation great again.

What they didn’t speak of but Sebai heard about was the terrorized and murdered villages, men beheaded, children taken from their homes for labor and into the army, women dragged away to be nothing but toys to break and cruelly discard, forests burned, animals butchered, and the land scorched to cinders if they sensed that victory was eluding them.

But she couldn’t bring herself to feel the terror of it. All of it belonged to Feven, still buried somewhere under the ruins. Sebai still clung to her last remnants of hope three days later, when they uncovered two more survivors. Later that day, they discovered Feven.

They concluded she had bled out at most a day after the blast.

“Where are you going?” A slender dark woman appeared on the rover’s passenger’s seat. Another agent, like the guide from Olympus.

“To Athens. I’m looking for an interesting research group to join.”

“We’re not currently seeking new collaborators.”

“May I have a look around at least?”

The woman paused, apparently lost in thought. Her AI was asking someone for guidance.

“All right,” she nodded. “We’re looking forward to meeting you, Erin.” She vanished.

The rover drove me the rest of the way in silence. I gazed out at the dream-like landscape of van Maanen B. Sharp spikes of obsidian rose from the curving ridges. The outermost surface, already cooked, had vaporized in the shedding of the red giant’s shell, and had left behind a land Dalí would have longed to paint. But, as I understood, that wasn’t the end; the equally strange land I was seeing originated rather recently when a giant impact stripped the planet of its remaining crust and most of the mantle. That’s why so few impact craters could be seen. This eerie land was young.

Castello’s Castle, finally rising over the horizon, did not live up to its name. The base was barely visible above the surface, save for a small observatory tower. An airlock opened for my vehicle and let me into the subterranean complex. The virtual woman appeared by its inner door. “Come in. We’re expecting you in the hall.”

I followed her through the labyrinthine corridors lined with austere printed regolith walls. The room hardly seemed more hospitable. There were three people inside. One a short pale person of androgynous features, the second a black woman with sparse clothes revealing silvery tattoos.

And Louis Castello.

He hadn’t changed much since the last records Bellugi had possessed. He’d scarcely aged. Though physically not resembling the original Antonio Arienti much, he’d stayed true to the type. His olive skin and dark eyes sported no obvious augments. In his plain shirt and trousers, he could have fit any period. He had lived through many.

“Hello, Erin,” he said casually. “We’re all pleased to meet you. Welcome to our humble station.”

Manu Virtanen. Ike Oladapo. Louis Castello. During our conversation over lunch, Virtanen almost never spoke; most of the discussion was supplied by Oladapo, on whom the agent I’d encountered was modeled, and Castello himself.

Searching for chemical peculiarities on the planet and in the debris disk… High-res radar and lidar imaging to reveal possible strange shapes… It all made sense together, even the strange attitude of the Olympians toward Castello’s Castle: the mixture of curiosity and derision.

“You’re trying to find some signs of the Ramakhi, aren’t you?”

“Of course.” Castello regarded me calmly. “Had you not understood that, we’d have nothing to talk about.”

“The others, at Olympus, probably think you’re fools.”

“Do you?”

Why? I wanted to ask. Why do you of all people pursue this? What’s in it for you?

“No,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean I think we’ve got odds on our side.”

“We? You’re not a part of our team yet.”

“We as humanity. This is something that should interest everybody. Pity that some can’t see that.”

Castello smiled, and so did Oladapo; only Virtanen still regarded me with her stony face.

“You can stay here for now,” Castello announced. “Let’s see how you fare.”

Three weeks later, I started suspecting that I was Floriana Bellugi’s only asset from aboard Chrysalis. But what should I do? I had found Castello but still had no idea what she wanted from him.

Nothing in his manner suggested his long and violent past. Yet when I tried to look beyond the innocent distracted smile, I could perhaps imagine the master puppeteer inside. There was something against-all-common-sense alluring about chameleons like Arienti, and something deeply chilling. He’d been the most perfect shape-shifter. He would seem to belong anywhere, be it a prestigious charity ball, a system-wide corporate board meeting, a scientific conference, a middle-class home, an impoverished slum, a seedy bar, a street gang, a mercenary squad, or a simple fishermen’s village on the shores of a long-forgotten island.

I could only imagine his life back on Earth. Something about the style of that life intrigued me despite myself. I could not lay my finger on it. How could I, a youngster who’d grown up in a totally different world, ever understand it? I suppose it bore the same sense of excitement and raw adventure that people of Arienti’s generation derived from tales of brave knights, seamen, or frontier settlers.

Even with my substantial augmented knowledge, I could hardly fathom the thrill of old Earth. Who would I have been in such a world, and what would I have seen? Such terrors and wonders…

I continued working with him. It was actually quite fascinating. On one of our walks outside to corroborate our robotic probes’ data, I interrupted the quiet white noise in our speakers and asked: “Why are you doing this in particular? You could go to any populated world, live a comfortable life…. Why go through so much trouble?”

“You’re here, so you know the answer already, no? If you can live forever, trying to find out what enabled that is just as good a way of spending your time as any,” he shrugged visibly even in his suit. “It satisfies curiosity and is sufficiently long-term to entertain me for quite a while. Maybe I’ll get tired of it if I encounter another dead end. Maybe not. You can plan only for a certain time ahead.”

“But we know so little about the Ramakhi from their messenger probe! It refused to tell us anything specific about its creators. There’s nowhere to start.”

The probe already spoke several human languages when we encountered it. It knew a lot about Earth-based life, our own biology and culture. It understood many figures of speech and conversed fluently. It must have been observing us for decades, but it never told us that. It managed to steer the first contact scenario into one that had been peaceful and relatively non-shattering for us.

“There’s plenty to start,” Arienti said dryly. “The isotopic composition of the probe’s alloys suggests it hadn’t assembled itself in our solar system. It was rather peculiar, in fact. The problem is, we don’t have precise enough measurements for other systems to make a comparison. We’re trying to supplement this data. Also, the age of the probe had been estimated at less than a hundred thousand years. It may have been assembled when the first modern humans started leaving Africa. We should be able to find many traces of the Ramakhi had they been around so recently. I’ve been tracking them for the better part of two centuries. I believe I’m getting closer.”

His words resonated in my ears. I had a strange sense of déja vu.

Two centuries? That must have been since his arrival in the Tau Ceti system already. Tau Ceti…

I felt like I was missing something important. I could go on like this for months and learn nothing more than the shallow image he’d shown to me. I had to get deeper.

It took two weeks’ planning, but finally I was sure I could do it. I waited for a moment when Arienti and Oladapo were outside, while Virtanen worked in the lab. The security systems were different from what I knew but compatible. I got in.

Arienti’s rooms seemed as inconspicuous and timeless as the man himself. Unlike him, they even lacked personality. You could see that someone lived here yet still learn little about him. I passed a small stack of spare clothes, the only ones to be seen. More could be printed easily.

No books; no such luxury to be brought here by a small expedition. None even printed here, though that would be considerably less luxurious.

No pictures on the walls, physical or projected. No physical mirrors. Nothing expendable at all.

An empty table stood by the wall. I sat at it, hesitating. If I tried to access the interface—there surely was one—I might give my attempt at espionage away. But if I didn’t, I’d learn nothing at all.

“Activate,” I said firmly.

I managed to persuade the system into thinking that I was Arienti. I almost wondered at how easy it had been, when an additional layer of security presented itself.

“I’ve noticed an unusual pattern in your access,” the holo said. It was a woman’s face: older, black, with an accent I couldn’t place. “Let me ask you a question.”

I drew a sharp breath. I could synthesize Arienti’s voice and mimic his speech pattern, true, and it might be enough—if I could answer.

“Where and when did we first meet face to face? Not quite this face, though,” she smiled.

I was lost. “I have to go. Switch off,” I said and hurried away.

Just in time. Arienti’s and Oladapo’s voices sounded in the corridor. I vanished into my room.

Shortly thereafter, Arienti appeared in my doorway. “We’ve found something today with Ike. I want you to come with me to see it.”

I tensed a little. “All right.”

Neither Oladapo nor Virtanen joined us. We traversed quite a distance in the rover, but the terrain grew too hard near the end. As we walked carefully across a spiky lava field, Arienti spoke: “Have I mentioned that I’d visited two other systems before this one? Tau Ceti. YZ Ceti. It was an interesting time. But as soon as I learned what I needed, I came here. Actually, I pulled a few strings to help make this expedition happen.”

“Really? I had no idea!” I acted properly surprised. “What inspired you?”

“Something that happened back at Tau Ceti. Did you know that a few of the colonists decided to establish a base at the outermost planet’s moons instead of the inner planets?”

I recalled it vaguely. He continued: “They found something there. A wreck of a failed spacecraft. Very, very old. The resemblance to the Ramakhi probe was uncanny.”

“That’s impossible,” I breathed out. “Everyone would have known.”

“If they’d made the discovery public, yes. But they didn’t. You might not know, but the political regime on-site wasn’t very friendly toward that approach. However, a few people who learned about it escaped and were… inspired.”

I could imagine his predatory smile, the teeth exposed in half-threatening, half-boasting fashion.

“The isotopic composition spoke clearly. The probe likely originated in the same system as the one that spoke to us. I boarded the first ship out of there. YZ Ceti was a good location for my purposes. I already had an inkling about where to start digging.”

Why are you telling me all this now? I almost asked, but stopped myself in time. We still walked side by side. I had the feeling of a prisoner going to her execution. Could I make it to the rover in time? But where could I go? I wouldn’t have enough fuel to go back to Olympus, and I couldn’t contact the base from here. No; my only chance was facing Arienti if I must. Perhaps I was just being paranoid.

“Aren’t you going to ask why?” he spoke and a shiver went down my spine. It took me a second to realize he was refering to his inkling. Or so I hoped.

“Why?” I said. My throat felt very dry.

For a moment, Arienti was silent. Then, very quietly, he said: “Who sent you here?”

“What?”

“I know you’ve spied on me. I repeat: Who sent you?”

I felt strange. I wanted to tell him. I almost did. He must have released something into my air, I realized. So far I was able to resist it. Would it stay that way?

“Well, you’ve come from Epsilon Eridani. So Bellugi, I guess? Or Iwamoto? Or… no, she wouldn’t…”

“What are you talking about? No one sent me here!”

I could hear him sigh in the speakers. “I should get the information out of you. But if the meds don’t work on you, that could be tiresome… Better to get it over quickly.”

Suddenly, I was gasping for air. My suit!

I fell to my knees. One of the shards ruptured my suit as I did and sliced into my knee. I cried out in horrid pain. Desperately, I fumbled around for my repair spray.

What are you going to do? You can repair the damage on your leg, but not what he did.

Black spots appeared in my vision. The air grew thinner. Words came to me from nowhere.

“Aster Sebai,” I wheezed.

Arienti stopped and turned abruptly. “What did you say?”

But I could not speak anymore. My precious air was escaping too fast.

Arienti’s blurred face—wait, not this Arienti’s, but another, also his—was the last thing I saw before blackness encompassed me.

She had been growing old. Felt the wear and tear of age pull at her body and render it weak. No longer could she run if someone on the street decided she wasn’t a good enough citizen for him. No longer could she defend herself, let alone the millions she wanted to speak for. No longer could she raise her voice high enough. Cancer ate at her body. With treatments, she might fight it. Without them, she would have at most two years left, likely less.

Looking back at her life, she felt bitter disappointment. None of the goals she’d striven for had come true. She’d wanted to save people. And what had come of it? Ruins, scorched earth, and a country divided by bloodshed. The hospital never reopened, although it was needed more than ever before.

At first, she’d tried to prevent more violence and ruin where she was. All in vain. Finally, she’d fled with hundreds of others. Abroad, she tried to speak for those less fortunate. It was difficult at first, but then she established herself as a known peace and civil rights advocate. She ran lectures, debates, fundraisers, and film screenings. She started petitions. She kept sending out letters.

The impact of it left her sad, angry, and disillusioned. True, she had her little victories.

But these were doused by much bigger defeats.

The war continued. People kept dying and suffering, while others gained immortality.

None of the attackers who’d killed Feven, none of the war criminals, had been punished to date.

In the first years, she’d feared for her life for speaking out loud. Then she realized they didn’t care. She wasn’t an enemy worth notice for them. She could do nothing.

Oh, if she could take it back, all the idealism and playing by the rules… if only she had the time.

So she bribed the gift administrator in town. The selection of people who would receive the gift was supposedly random across the world, but no one with eyes to see believed that. She was an aging, bitter, unaccomplished refugee woman. Had she waited for her turn, she would have died before her name came up. The bribe consumed all of her savings and set her deep in debt, but it worked.

A year later, suffering from multiple metastases and feeling ever so weak physically from the disease as well as the treatments, it was her turn to accept the gift. The procedure was entirely painless. She didn’t even feel the time spinning around her, until it was just four days later, and she emerged in excellent health and, if she opted for repeating the procedure every couple of decades, possibly at the start of her life everlasting.

She felt young again. And so, so full of rage.

Aster Sebai.

I woke with the name on my lips.

I woke.

Alive. Breathing. With a patched up leg; hurting, but already almost healed. I took in my perceptions at once: the undersuit I was still wearing, the responsive foam beneath me, the walls of molded regolith. Less than four hours had elapsed since I’d almost died, unless someone had tampered with my sense of time. I was likely still at Castello’s Castle.

Aster Sebai. Who was she?

I could recall a face to that name. No, more than one face.

“I’d like to apologize for that earlier misunderstanding.” Arienti stopped in the door and looked me up and down. I was momentarily distracted by flashbacks of other faces, male, his earlier faces.

How did I know? Bellugi never showed them to me.

“Why did you spare me?”

I took him by surprise. “You still don’t know!”

Faces, names… fragments. What do they mean?

“Your failsafe probably hasn’t kicked in fully yet. I should leave you to it… but I’m curious.” He sat in a chair across from my bed. “It’s such a long time since we’ve last met. I wonder what happens when we meet again.”

His words made no sense to me. But I remembered seeing him before. Flirting with a stranger amidst the freezing clouds of Saturn. Watching him fall into the endless pit of the gas giant’s atmosphere.

A starship, one of the first built outside the Solar System. A different face this time, and behind it the same man, alive and well.

“How could I have gotten someone else’s memories?” I spoke. But even as I was saying that, I already knew full well that wasn’t the truth.

Looking down at the pleading man, she felt nothing but contempt. “You deserve even worse,” she’d said and pulled the trigger.

A year after the first one, the second of the men responsible for Feven’s death lay dead at her feet.

The sayings were right. It was much easier the second time.

There were still so many to be hunted.

Aster Sebai. How long have I not been her?

Arienti was observing my reaction with the mild curiosity of someone watching an animal perform a circus feat.

My head hurt. My vision blurred. In my mind, images spun in a carousel of memories.

One recurrent theme: death. So many dead.

“What have I done?” I whispered. My voice broke.

What am I? Have I really done all this?

My own past was a mystery to me. Fragments, pieces, scattered without any apparent order.

“Aster,” Arienti said. He rolled the name on his tongue, tasting it perhaps for the first time in decades or even over a century.

I’ve had many names in the past. Aster Sebai had been the first, and Erin Taiwo was only the most recent. It wasn’t even from the same language as my original name. Had it ever meant something for me? Or was I just cautious? I couldn’t remember.

Just flashbacks of my life: Mercenary, informant, shifter, influencer, adventurer, gambler. I had been every last one. Up until the moment the weariness set in. Then I became something else again.

But I always knew. Had access to the memories of the past, should I want to. I mostly did not.

What made me forget?

I shivered. Arienti leaned closer, deep fascination in his face. He extended a hand and touched my cheek. I flinched.

He chuckled. “Relax. It’s just intriguing to watch this transformation.”

“We’ve met before.”

“Yes.” His eyes gleamed. “Care to go for a walk while I help you piece your past together?”

My headache was fading, and my leg felt better. I pulled myself up. “Let’s go.”

I felt my strength return as we slowly walked through the corridors of Castello’s Castle. Finally, we reached the observation room. From its tower, we could see the bleak land everywhere around us.

Arienti spoke: “Long ago, you started hunting me. You tried to kill me on Saturn. I took the fall but was rescued by a lower-level airship. A fortunate fate—or someone else’s calculated plan. We were both onboard the Shiva, but I managed to avoid you when our awake times overlapped. Then we crossed paths again on the way to YZ Ceti. You remembered me, but laughed off our old incident. We became lovers during the journey. I even told you about what I’d seen on that godforsaken moon. It excited you, of course. You told me that you’d finally found someone who didn’t bore you abominably. But that doesn’t tend to last, does it? I promoted exploration of the YZ Ceti system and tried to put together an expedition here, but my resources were depleted, my influence limited. It was all too slow and intangible for you, I suppose. We went our separate ways. I don’t know what you hoped to find on the other side of your journey, but I hope you haven’t found it.”

I shuddered. “Why is that?”

“Because simply reaching our goals is the most unsatisfying thing that can happen to us immortals.”

“So you picked a goal you can never reach.”

“Oh no, not never. That would be foolish. Not exciting at all. No, my goal may take me many more centuries, even millennia, but it’s far from impossible.”

It still didn’t seem his style. I would expect him to engage in power plays, in feats of senseless adventure seeking, but this seemed too noble a pursuit for someone like him.

“Why do you do it?” I pressed on.

“Because it’s beautiful,” he said simply. “Look around. Don’t you see?”

I gazed at the barren landscape ahead. It was strange, alien even. Eerily beautiful, yes.

I only realized he was speaking again when he shook my shoulder.

“Sorry,” I snapped out of it. “It really is beautiful. Staggering, actually.”

“So you understand.”

“I’m not sure.”

“It surpasses us. Whatever we find here, a clue to the Ramakhi’s past or just a fascinating system, it’s something vastly bigger than us. I think it’s the only thing I can appreciate after the centuries of human trifles. I’m bored by humanity. Bored by petty fights and intrigues, bored by risking and gambling, bored by relationships, by culture, by everything. It fades and only leaves a bad palate. I’ve shifted toward things that have been here for eons and will be here eons after we perish. That’s what’s really interesting. It lasts.”

Arienti surprised me. I didn’t expect to find such a philosophical spirit in him. He had been so pragmatic, as long as I could recall. But then again, I hadn’t seen him for centuries.

Eyes still on the big game of deciphering the Ramakhi’s fate, he found solace where I could not.

Our lives are fleeting. Our thoughts and feelings, even more so. But I couldn’t look upon the stars and planets and forget that I was human. However fascinating and grand I could find the Universe, I was too absorbed in our mayfly troubles.

Maybe that’s why I couldn’t bear it in the end.

The emptiness was unbearable. A gaping hole where her identity had been.

So many dead. Their deaths no longer meant anything to her. She wasn’t sure when the moment had come that she continued hunting them down just out of inertia. Everything else, gone.

She eventually tracked down everyone connected to the hospital bombing. Then she focused on war criminals from the ensuing civil war. Finally, on those who enabled it in the first place.

Antonio Arienti. The arms supplier.

This one was good, covered his tracks almost perfectly. But she had plenty of time.

He was on Mars.

But before she could find him there, he disappeared. Her anger fueled her once again, but it was different than before, almost burnt-out.

Then she found his trail again.

Saturn.

This time, she was more careful. Changed her appearance once again. Polished her new backstory. Left some false trails around the system.

They finally met face to face aboard the Zephyr, deep in the clouds of Saturn. He was courteous, charming, and flirted with her. She pretended to take an interest, and after a few meet-ups, not too soon, suggested kite-flying in the clouds. He was delighted by the prospect.

She only regretted that she couldn’t see his face when she struck him down. The damaged wings fluttered about him as he fell. She flew lower to observe his fall longer, but he quickly disappeared in the underlying cloud layer.

Her work was done.

She returned home. Home… It felt like one no longer. She excavated the box. In it rested a small treasure: entirely worthless for anyone but her. A reminder of a fortune she had lost ages ago.

The photograph of Feven was the most precious item. She touched the smooth glossy surface of the Polaroid picture a bit uncertainly, almost hesitant to believe it was still there. It had faded so little in over a century.

She may have been looking at it for hours before she spoke.

“I’m so sorry,” she said with her throat tight, and abruptly closed the box.

The next day, she appeared at a local aug-clinic.

“I want a rewire.”

The words almost stuck in her throat.

She still hesitated when they sat her in the soft chair and explained the process once again, as the laws dictated. When she nodded, she was still full of doubts. She had changed her appearance and name many times, but never herself. She knew her concept of identity had become laughably outdated long ago, but she was still seized with anxiety when the rewiring started.

She had to be awake to keep telling them what she thought, felt, remembered.

She didn’t know at which point she stopped worrying.

The emptiness was not gone. But the guilt, sorrow, and anxiety were. The emptiness, she knew instantly, could now be filled very easily with anything that pleased her.

“Are you satisfied with the rewire?” they asked her.

She was.

It had been her first one, and certainly not her last.

As we stood there in mutual silence, I remembered all. I remembered myself, all the different selves of me during those years.

Most had been monsters.

Still, most of them had known.

They would play the endless games of hide and seek, extracting information, gaining advantage… Most chose not to dwell on the grim bloody past and focused on the sometimes bloody but bright now. They would climb the deadly slopes of Aamu’s cliffs, almost die performing the boldest feats of old-school exploration, daringly challenge every obstacle Nature and Man presented.

Drinking the finest, eating the rarest delicacies, meeting all the strange and wonderful people, allies, enemies, lovers, acquaintances (never friends). Enjoying the tingle of beams of different suns. Having fun. Always being a step ahead of the others.

Everything would become the game.

Except when they would wake up in the middle of the night soaked in cold sweat, shaking from the nightmares, scared and paranoid. Alone. Trusting no one. Always on the run.

Even with the rewires piling up, the woman who used to be Aster Sebai a long time ago grew restless. Would she have to remake herself into a complete psychopath to reach peace? But even that might not help. No, the only way was to end herself.

And so she did. She buried her past as deep as she could. Then, she forgot. I forgot.

“How could you do it?” I spoke. “How could you stay you?”

He shrugged. “I’ve had some help, but I guess I’m built this way.”

Silence fell once more.

I felt whole, yet set loose. Drifting without purpose. Whatever power play Bellugi had engaged me in, because there was no way this had been an accident, I wanted no part in it.

“So what are you going to do now?” Arienti shot me a sideways glance. “Will you try to kill me? Betray Bellugi? Let everything go and make a break for it? Build a small empire?”

I should have hated him, but I just felt indifferent about him. So many conflicting notions of the man, yet none of that mattered now. Enmities, romances, and alliances come and go.

“I want to have a look at the thing you discovered, if that wasn’t just an excuse to lure me out and kill me,” I said. “Then I’ll decide what to do next.”

“Why?” I asked once again on our walk outside. This time, we both meant why had he come here to pursue the Ramakhi question.

“The chemical composition again. By the time I left Tau Ceti, we’d already had some data from the Procyon system. Although it’s a binary and just one component is a white dwarf, it confirmed some suspicions about the chemical make-up of white dwarf systems. It also reinforced my suspicion that the probes had come from such a place. Preferably not a binary, though: A lone white dwarf system. One with lots of planetary material, perhaps, with strong metallic spectral lines. One that would be close enough to Tau Ceti and our Sun. There is only one such system.”

He stopped at the apex of a cliff and spread his arms. “Look around. Isn’t it fascinating? We may be seeing a world from which the probes originated. You know what is also interesting? About sixteen thousand years ago, van Maanen’s Star came within three light-years of the Sun. It’s a great distance to overcome, but it can be done, as we’ve amply demonstrated ourselves. Even a civilization with much less advanced technological capabilities could manage to send a probe across that gap.”

“Are you suggesting…?”

“That the Ramakhi have come from here? Exactly. But that’s not the end of it. Can’t you figure it out yourself?”

Probes less than a hundred thousand years old. A close encounter in a more recent period. I looked around. Extremely young surface. Most of the crust and mantle had vaporized in a giant impact, leaving behind this barren planet.

“This was their world,” I stated in disbelief. “They evolved here, around the white dwarf, when the planet perhaps had a strong greenhouse atmosphere and conditions for life, they built interstellar probes—but the destruction of their planet wiped them out.” I shook my head. “But that doesn’t add up, does it? If they had the capacity to go interstellar, even if just with uncrewed probes, they must have colonized the rest of this system. We should be able to find traces of them everywhere.”

“Everywhere in a system so unstable… and so sparsely explored by us?” Arienti said quietly. “The remaining planets are much further out, a difficult place to start colonizing. This planet has no moon. The debris around the star would constitute the best target for early space exploration. We got on well with colonizing asteroids. But our system was very stable. What if they just didn’t consider colonizing the rest of their system worthwhile? Instead, they turned to other stars. And at least once, they discovered life. They managed to construct interstellar probes with immense learning capabilities… but what if they never were an interstellar civilization themselves? What if every single one of our conjectures about them has rested on a wrong assumption?” I had never seen Arienti so excited, not even in the countless records I had found long ago. Maybe he never had been, until he embarked on his futile search.

I still didn’t quite believe him. His theory sounded appealing, but it was constructed of assumptions so fragile that one strong data point would suffice to destroy it whole.

But we’ve been searching for that one strong data point for centuries, haven’t we?

“Finally, we may have something here,” Arienti interrupted my train of thought. “As you’ve pointed out, we should be able to see traces of space industry in the system.”

“They found something in the debris disk?”

“Not there. But here.”

We arrived at a crevice within a small impact crater. I struggled to see what had been inside, but then I recognized the outlines.

“What is it?” I said.

“We don’t know yet. A fragment of a mining device? Of a habitat? It’s older than the new crust of this planet. Must have drifted in the debris disk for a long time before crashing here.” Arienti’s voice in the comms was surprisingly soft. “It’s not a proof of my theory. But it’s a start.”

We spent many hours examining the strange remnants. I had never seen the original Ramakhi probe, though. I had lived thousands of kilometers away from where it appeared. In another lifetime…

On our walk back to the rover, Arienti suddenly broke the awed silence: “Have you followed news from Earth and colonies other than yours?”

“Not much.” First I’d wanted to put my past behind me, and then I didn’t even know I had one.

“I have. I’ve devoted much of my time to studying how our societies evolved after the gift. What intrigues me is that in the early years, we set out to explore whole new systems we’d colonized. Now we’re retracting to one or two planetary colonies in a system each. Small bases are disappearing. Research stations in the outer reaches are becoming automated or diminishing. There are still plenty of hermits who prefer to live outside big colonies, but they too grow fewer, while big settlements are growing and focusing inward…. Do you understand?”

I nodded, but he continued: “Even though we’ve gone interstellar, we may ultimately be on the same path as the Ramakhi. Most will become oblivious and more vulnerable to… cosmic accidents. The few who won’t… well, they will scatter and then die off. Maybe we’ll push a few more light-years forward, extend our small bubble of colonized space… and then our candle will go out.”

I considered his words. Pure speculation. Fitting the reality into the frame of his worldview, while he should be doing the opposite. But still… what if he wasn’t wrong?

We journeyed back to Castello’s Castle in silence. Only when we were helping each other out of our heavy suits, he said: “I think I’ll make the discovery public.”

I looked at him in surprise.

His face was serious, pensive. For a second, he didn’t resemble the old Arienti; nor Olivieri; nor Castello. Someone new was standing before me. “I learned what I could alone. But if I continue this way, it dies with me, even if I have followers like my companions here and have sent backup messages elsewhere some time ago—what intrigued Bellugi, I suppose. Perhaps, if I announce it, it will spur a new period of exploration. New adventures. New opportunities. New world for me to fit in.”

None of us can bear being ourselves for too long, can we? I thought. Will I be able to cope?

I looked back at Arienti. My foe. My lover. My enigma. My target. Could I ever escape the weight of the memories?

As if reading my mind, he spoke: “Chrysalis begins its return voyage in a month. You should be there.”

I could stay. But how long would it last before Arienti and I wanted to kill each other again?

I could go elsewhere in-system. Yet what would I do here? Search for castles in the air?

I didn’t want to drift anymore. I wanted a purpose, so I gave myself one. First, close the previous chapter of my life. Then…

Before I boarded my rover in the airlock, I turned and looked at Arienti standing behind the thick transparent wall. “Goodbye,” I said through my suit’s comms.

He didn’t speak, but his gaze seemed to say that there are not really any goodbyes for immortals. Only I clung to the outdated custom.

I chose to sleep through the starship’s voyage. I needed no more time to decide what would happen next. Erin Taiwo’s first and also last meeting with Floriana Bellugi occurred on Turms less than half a year before the first departure of Chrysalis.

Aster Sebai’s—or whatever I would call myself, the remembering myself—history with the woman had been much more complex and by far not over. Questions. Answers. Favors. Debts. Bellugi was a master of shadow games, and it was impossible for Sebai not to make some deals with her when she’d left Earth. But perhaps she was on Bellugi’s radar long before that. The woman used information like other, less intricate people use blades and bullets. And if someone grew too dangerous—like Arienti—why use such old-fashioned weapons, if mere information could do the job?

The original Aster would perhaps want to end it once and for all. But I was not her anymore. I had her memories, but I could no longer understand her.

Upon my return to the Epsilon Eridani system, her residence had been the first place I’d headed to. I was expected.

The same furniture, the same rosy porcelain tea set, probably tea from the same plantation, and the same Floriana Bellugi, looking not a day older than decades ago.

“Welcome, Erin,” she smiled. “Or should I say Aster?”

“I’ve used many names. Pick one.” I sat across from her and measured her with a calm gaze.

Her smile didn’t falter a bit. “Thank you for coming. Tea?”

We drank from the dainty cups for a moment, both silent, but I felt almost no tension between us. Live long enough and you get used to this.

“Arienti says hi,” I remarked.

“I assume it’s no good if I tell you to reciprocate it.”

“No good at all.”

“So he stayed at van Maanen?”

“Perhaps. I wouldn’t know.” I wouldn’t put it past him to organize another expedition elsewhere. So much was left to be discovered by van Maanen’s Star, but would he have stayed there once his discovery—or rather Virtanen and Oladapo’s discovery, as Louis Castello didn’t figure in any of the reports—was made public? Maybe he’d changed his identity again. Maybe he was still pulling the strings out there. I liked to imagine him in one of the hermitages, alone, detached, like he’d been all his life, but more in touch with the outer world than most of us. “And even if I would, well…”

You wanted me to remember and kill him, I left unsaid. You wanted to get rid of both of us in one move, perhaps one you considered apt or even poetic justice, and maybe gain some insights into the Ramakhi question as a bonus.

Bellugi nodded, smiling. “So what exactly happened to the Ramakhi?”

“Waited for the unavoidable collision to wipe them out? Tried evacuating the planet? Took their own lives one by one? Committed a mass suicide? Who knows. Seems they’re no longer around and that they were never really around much, but how can we be really sure about that? The van Maanen artifact doesn’t tell us much about their past. It’s groundbreaking, but the search is far from over.”

She clicked her tongue. But it was all theater for me. Given how uncannily she’d hoarded any information she could find, she already knew what I was going to tell her as soon as the Chrysalis approached the system, perhaps much sooner.

I stood up.

Bellugi faked surprise. “Oh, you aren’t going, are you, Aster? We have so much to talk about, and you have hardly touched your supper!”

“You know what they used to say… who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.”

“You cannot possibly be mad at me for manipulating you. Blame yourself for choosing to forget earlier. Or are you mad because you’ve remembered?” She shook her head. “You of all people, calling me the devil…. We are all monsters, my dear one. Only some know it. And accept it.”

I didn’t sit back down. “That’s not me anymore.”

“No, that’s denial, sweetheart. Grow up. It’s been centuries, for gods’ sake. You can’t escape your past.”

“No. But I can choose my future. You asked me if accepting the Ramakhi gift had been a grave mistake. I failed to comprehend it as Erin. Then, when I remembered, I thought that it had been. But now I’m not so sure. It didn’t help us eliminate suffering, but it enabled us to reach magnificent things. Before, I chose to forget. Not anymore. Lacking past is a liability. But I won’t dwell on it. I need to remember—if only to know to move on. I’m done with my past. I will take no more life. Play no more selfish games in which innocent bystanders lose everything. I will not pursue revenge, nor become a crusader for justice. I will help where I can, in the little ways. They count, too. They may count most of all. So that’s why, in a moment, I will walk out of this door and never return. You won’t stop me. You know I’m no danger to you. Maybe you’ll even enjoy watching me build my new life. Place bets on when I should fail.” I smiled. “You will lose them all.”

I wasn’t feeling as sure as my words sounded. I might have uncovered the past, but the future held no certainties for me. When you might have an eternity ahead of you, how can you bear all the mistakes, disappointments, injustices, pains that you eventually endure? I might break down under the weight of my sins, or the others’. I might choose to bury it all again in a moment of weakness. I might become like Bellugi, uncaring, oblivious, even cruel. I might repeat my past mistakes all over again.

Then again, I might not. That’s what is so beautiful about the future.