Truncat

Adrian wasn't really sure what physically proximate friends did for fun, but Tina had all sorts of ideas. They met up for breakfast the next morning at a public maker near Adrian's place, and the queue had never seemed shorter, as they gabbled in the near-silence of the thronged corridor.

They walked while they shoveled post-scarcity waffles and sausage into their mouths, Tina remarking constantly on the crowds, the sheer thronging humanity of it all. The parks were all too dense for fun, but they found ample elbow room way out in the east end, where untalented sculptors operated public studios in the unpopular former scraplands.

The fight was Adrian's fault. "I want to meet him," Adrian said, as they watched a man with hammer and chisel crawl over a hideous marble lion.

"Him?" Tina said. "Why? He stinks."

Adrian smiled and shushed her. "Not so loud -- anyway, he's not as bad as some of the people around here. No, not him -- Nestor, the ship's engineer. You know --"

Her expression slammed shut. "No. God! No! Adrian, why --" She choked on whatever she was going to say next.

Adrian, taken aback, said carefully, "Why not? I really, you know, admire him."

"But you've been inside his head!" she said, scandalized. "How could you look him in the eye after --" Again, words failed her.

"But that's why I want to meet him! What I saw, what he knows, it just makes so much sense. I feel like he could really tell me what it's all about."

Her eyes took on the aspect of steel again, the million lightyear stare. "If you talk to Nestor, I'll never speak to you again. I'll -- I'll turn you in! I'll report you and all of your pals!"

"Jesus, Tina, what's wrong with you? You're supposed to be my friend and now you're going to turn me in?" He was so angry, he could hardly speak. He wished he was talking to her over the network, so that he could just hang up and walk away. He did the next best thing, turning on his heel and walking away.

"Hey," Tina shouted, angry too.

He kept on walking.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

She found him in his private place, holding a one-sided argument with his mother. "Mom, I'm old enough to get a place of my own, and you can't stop me," he shouted into the buoy's guts. In her cochlea, he heard his mother's grunt of anger, and his HUD was filled with the scrolling system log as she angrily deleted his files, being on a particularly nasty tear that day.

"Mom!" he shouted again. "Talk to me or I'll -- I'll lock you out!"

Tina watched this, half in, half out of the buoy, her bottom exposed to the frigid stinging rain, her face flushed with the captured body heat in the buoy. Adrian had yet to notice her, too absorbed in his conversation.

"That's it," he said. "I'm locking you out now."

He opened his eyes and sighed back against the buoy's bulkhead. He saw Tina and let out a surprised "Yah!"

He recovered quickly, gave her a nasty look and said, "Get out! Jesus, just leave me alone!"

She'd been calling him, leaving messages on his voice mail for a week, but he had her blocked and the messages just kept getting returned, unheard. Defiantly, she crawled the rest of the way in and huddled as far from him as she could, which still meant that she was halfway in his lap.

"God, they must be stupid in space," Adrian ranted. "Can't you understand I don't want to talk to you? Go away!"

Tina gave him an appraising look. "One thing we learn in space," she said, "is how to outwait a bad mood. I'm not leaving until we have a chance to talk, and if you don't like it, that's too bad. You're not getting rid of me unless you throw me into the lake."

Adrian fumed and closed his eyes. He searched fruitlessly for a decent bootleg, but his connections had dried up and dropped off in the two weeks since his mother's spot checks had curtailed his trading. It could take days to build them up again.

"Fine," he said at length. "Say your piece and go, all right?"

"Turn on public access," Tina said. Adrian started to protest, but she fixed him with her stare. "Do it," she said, firmly.

Adrian sighed dramatically and closed his eyes, then watched as all the bootlegs he'd stored with her were passed back to his storage. Everything! "Thanks," he said, cautiously. "What's going on? Are you planting evidence before turning me in?"

She shook her head. "I deserve that, I suppose. There's one more," she said. And a file name appeared in his HUD.

"What is it?" he said.

"Just try it," she said.

He rolled it up and baked it, then grunted in shock. It was Nestor's backup, complete and whole, centuries of life, stretching up to the current day. There was Tina in the memories, her birth on ship, her growing up. There was the voyage, the long trip taken in vain and the long return home. The new memories were mirror-bright and cold as space, all the vigor and passion drained with nothing but a hard waiting in their place.

He opened his eye. "Where --" he began, but couldn't finish. He waved his hands at her.

Tina grinned wryly. "I took it from the ship," she said. "I still have access to its utility files. It's just past Pluto now, spacing out for another mission. That made it a little tricky to transfer, but I got it."

"Thanks," he said.

She tilted her head. "Don't thank me," she said.

It was sinking in now, that hardness, that waiting, the centuries ahead dull and indistinguishable from the ones behind, and no hope of it ever ending. The miserable, fatal knowledge that there was only more of this, more and more, forever, and no break in the monotony. It settled over him like lead weight, sapping everything, even the anger at his mother. Endless days of plenty ...

"How did he get so, so --"

"We used to say he was 'arid,'" Tina said. "None of the parents on the ship would let the kids go near him, so of course we snuck over to see him whenever we could. He hasn't had a rejuve in, oh, forever, and he looks like a silver skeleton. We'd pester him with questions, and he'd just stare and stare, then finally say something so amazingly depressing."

"But how? He was so, so -- passionate. He made me feel like there was a chance, like I could make a difference," Adrian said. That first bootleg, it must have dated back to before the ship left, a relative century before, and it was flushed into Mohan's honey-pot when the ship returned and Nestor made a fresh backup.

Tina shrugged. "Space changes people," she said, simply. "Time, too. He's nearly 400 now, you know. My parents called him a post-person. You know, what comes after people. That's why we didn't ship out again -- they don't want that to happen to them. Nestor wasn't the only one."

Adrian shuddered. A ship full of people like that, years cooped up in quarters tighter than any he'd known on Earth ...

"You see why I didn't want you to meet him," she said.

"Oh, I can take care of myself," he said. "You didn't have to worry about me."

She gave him another quizzical look. Her glance was more natural now, less spacey. Her skin, too, had taken on a tone that was more human. "I wasn't worried about you," she said. "I was worried about Nestor! He's OK most of the time, but when you get him talking about the old days, he just breaks down. You've never seen anyone so miserable. Poor old Nestor," she said, with feeling.

"Say, I've got one more for you, if you're interested," she said. "Brand new," she added.

"Sure," Adrian said and opened his directory. He took the file he found there, rolled it, baked it.

It was Tina, the short life of Tina, the claustrophobia and unimaginable distances of space, the tight and deep friendships in the tiny shipboard community, the loneliness in the crowds of Earth. Her spying him on the streets of this strange and overwhelming city, her relief when he didn't rebuff her. And him -- him, through her eyes, smart and savvy and frightening. Frightening? Yes, his anger and his rejection, his unfathomable values and ideas. It was short, her backup, a mere 17 years' worth of consciousness, and it took him a bare moment to bake it.

Tina was looking down at her feet.

"Hey," Adrian said. "Tina?"

Tina looked up. She was scared, those eyes wide and guileless.

"Yes?" she said.

"Switch on guest access, OK?" Adrian said. Then he pushed her a copy of his last backup.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

He spent as long as he could bumming around downtown before catching a subway home. His mother hadn't called him since he'd locked her out of his personal storage and sent her a copy of his backup and the flash-baking app, and the thought of seeing her face-to-face made his stomach knot.

Leadenly, he took the stairs down to the subterranean level where his family slept, and hit the door code. It slid open, revealing his father, alone, staring up at the ceiling.

"Dad?" Adrian said. His cochlea rang. He answered.

"Hi, Adrian," his father said, in his ear. He sounded tired.

"Where's Mom?" Adrian asked, with a growing sense of foreboding.

"Oh, she went out," Adrian's father said, vaguely.

"Is she angry?"

Adrian expected a chuckle, but none came. "No," his father said, flatly. "Not angry."

"Are you angry?"

His father shifted his bulk and drew Adrian into a long hug. "No, son, I'm not angry either," he whispered aloud in Adrian's ear.

It took Adrian a moment to register that his father had spoken aloud, and when he did, it hardly eased his nervousness.

"What's going on, Dad?" he asked, finally.

His father sat up, ducking his head for the low ceiling. "I owe you an apology," he said.

"For what?"

His father switched back to subvocal. "All this business with the University. You deserve to choose what you want to do. We had a long talk about it this afternoon, and we decided that it's not our place to tell you what to study. I'll take you to see Bosco in the morning, and we can show him the essay you worked up with your friend in India."

Adrian didn't know what to make of that, except that he felt vaguely guilty. "Why? What changed your mind?"

His father flopped onto his back and stared at the ceiling. "I read the paper," he said. "It's good. Interesting thesis, good execution. Thought-provoking. It's a good paper. You could really start something with it."

"Yeah?" Adrian said, blushing. His HUD flashed an alert. His father was pushing a file into his storage. Adrian examined it: a backup, his father's backup. Adrian understood, now. He knew that if he looked in his father's storage that he'd see a copy of his own backup there.

"Yes. You and your friends, you could have a real destiny. Post-people, the last generation on Earth -- that's smart stuff."

Adrian startled. Post-person. He thought of Nestor, saurian, purposeless, cold and hard. Of Tina, looking for a job, a thing to do every day.

A thought occurred to him. "What are you going to do when I start school, Dad?"

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe deadhead for a while, see what things are like in another century. I know that's what your mother wants to do."

They'd talked about deadheading before, but Adrian had never really believed they'd do it. Gone for a century -- frozen in cold sleep like millions of others, waiting to see what the future held.

"I'll miss you," he said.

"Oh, you'll get used to it," Adrian's father said. "I can't tell you how many people I know who're deadheading now. Almost everyone I ever knew, really. We'll see each other again before you know it."

When he woke in the morning, his mother was back, asleep between him and his father. Automatically, he checked his in box. His mother had sent a copy of her backup, too. He got up quietly, careful not to disturb her, and snuck away.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Tina answered on the second ring, sounding groggy.

"'lo?"

"Tina?"

"Hi," she mumbled.

"Listen, do you want a job?" he said.

"Huh?" She was waking up now.

"A job -- do you still want a job?"

"Sure," she said.

"You're hired," he said.

"For what?"

Adrian rolled up and flashed Nestor's backup, feeling the hopeless, helpless weight of eternity. He flashed his mother's backup, his father's. He grinned. "Here, let me dump you the job requirements," he said, and dumped the files on her.

"Start with these. Send them around, everyone you know. Don't ask for anything in return, but if they send you anything back, pass it around too." He swallowed, prepared a set to send to Mohan. "We're gonna be post-people, but we're gonna do it right," he said.

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